


Runaway Baby (Getaway Darling)

by ambivalentangst



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Adult Michelle Jones, Adult Peter Parker, Awesome Michelle Jones, BAMF Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe), Big Brother Peter Parker, F/M, Morgan Stark Says Fuck, Morgan Stark-centric (Marvel Cinematic Universe), Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Not Spider-Man: Far From Home Compliant, Parent Pepper Potts, Parent Tony Stark, Teenage Morgan Stark - Freeform, peter parker says fuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:14:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27565828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambivalentangst/pseuds/ambivalentangst
Summary: Morgan’s never claimed to have great impulse control, and when Oliver Hammer, son of Justin Hammer, brags about the stupidly expensiverockdiamondhis family is using as interior decor before being an absolute douche bag to her, she doesn’t feel particularly conflicted about deciding to take it off their hands to prove a point.She will admit thatcontinuingto commit felonies is not something she expected to come out of it, but then again, she’s always enjoyed a good time. The creation of her alter ego—complete with a series ofgorgeoussupersuits—is just an added bonus, no matter what Peter or MJ have to say about it.//Or, Morgan Stark’s life of crime begins at a gala, but Black Cat’s career doesn’t stop there.
Relationships: Michelle Jones & Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe), Michelle Jones/Peter Parker, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe)
Comments: 109
Kudos: 104





	1. Chapter 1

Morgan’s life of crime begins at a gala.  


This seems unlikely, but it’s not, really, considering that a) her mom and her dad _abandon_ her to go talk with a celebrity they’ve met before but want to use to sponsor a new product b) Peter isn’t there because he convinced Shuri to go with him to tear down a crime syndicate in Spain (she’s pretty sure it’s in Spain, anyway), and c) she hates formal events in the first place.

Her dress is itchy, and she doesn’t know _why_ she agreed to come, except, yes, she does because Peter informed her a few weeks ago that her dad is getting flustered about the possibility of her growing up and not wanting to spend time with him now that she’s in _high school already, Pete._

Peter does a _very_ good imitation of her dad when he’s worried about something that doesn’t need worrying about, good enough to make her laugh and also good enough for her to offer to tag along tonight, which is why she is standing in front of the dickish son of Justin Hammer, Oliver Hammer.

Good ol’ Justin went to jail for a while before she was born, and while that normally wouldn’t bother Morgan—most of her aunts and uncles have done the same—he got out because of his money. Besides lacking the dramatic flair of a true prison break, it’s sleazy and cheap, just like the family as a whole.

Oliver, however, is her age, and he’s currently talking about the fancy diamond his dad bought off a museum.

“It’s over a hundred carats,” he tells her, expression wide but sharp at the corners in a way that lets Morgan know that this is supposed to impress her. Annoyingly enough, he’s the taller of the two of them, and he stares down the bridge of his nose at her, his black and white suit crisp but plain next to her glittering, indigo get-up. “It’s _huge_ , and it’s a centerpiece in the living room of our penthouse.”

“Wow,” she deadpans, searching the crowd for her mom or her dad. Morgan doesn’t _need_ an excuse to blow Oliver off; her dad’s humiliated his in front of Congress, after all. However, she knows due to previous experience that Oliver is persistent and will likely follow her wherever she may head off to. Her parents are capable of scaring him off, but until they show up, it’s easiest to stay where she is, leaning against a wall with a glass of so-so sparkling grape juice.

“I know,” Oliver sighs dramatically. “You wouldn’t _believe_ how much it cost. At an auction, he could’ve gotten it for less, but since he had to convince the museum—”

“I’m dying to know,” she lies, mostly because she knows he’ll tell her anyway and would prefer to not beat around the bush about it.

“Fifty million.”

Morgan has to slap a hand over her mouth so she doesn’t spit juice over her dress. “For a _rock?”_

The money doesn’t faze her. Given her upbringing, she’s seen more spent in one go, though Oliver seems to forget that he’s bragging to the daughter of two billionaires. It’s the uselessness of it that gets her. The Hammers could’ve donated that or put it into some start-up or done _anything_ other than blow that kind of change on _decor._

“It’s over a hundred carats, Morgan,” he insists as if she’s forgotten what he told her not even a minute ago.

She resists the urge to punch him, glaring not very subtly at him and the hair he’s put too much gel in. “You’ve said, _Oliver,”_ she snipes, irritated with his use of her name.

“I was just making sure you remembered!”

She rolls her eyes. “I remember that you’re a douche just fine. Go bother someone else.”

He sniffs, leaning into her space. “You’re just jealous,” he drawls with no small amount of satisfaction. His breath smells like shrimp. Morgan doesn’t even _like_ shrimp, and to make it worse, when she doesn’t respond, squinting at him in an attempt to comprehend how to begin telling him how utterly idiotic he is, Oliver smirks. “See? You can’t even respond. Girls just don’t get this kind of thing. The diamond’s an _investment._ It’s gonna’ be worth way more when we sell it later.”

Morgan has a lot of things going through her mind, like _she can’t respond because it takes more than two seconds to process his stupid ass_ , like _she knows what a fucking investment is_ , like _this is why MJ says “eat the rich”._

What comes out is arguably more direct than any of that. “Get away from me, or I’m going to dump my drink on you.”

He grins, getting closer on purpose as his blue eyes twinkle with amusement. “What, did I _offend_ you?” And then, the nail in the coffin. “Is it that time of the month?”

He, more than just about anybody after their numerous run-ins, should know better than to call her bluff. With a jerk of her wrist, Oliver ends up with a faceful of grape juice, and she sets the glass down on the nearest table as she storms away from his spluttering.

She’s not sure how carbonated liquid feels in one’s eyes, but she hopes it stings.

She can see her parents still with the celebrity—an actress, Morgan thinks—and she heads across the room. Whether because the gala is in full swing and people are occupied with one another or because of her expression, nobody stops her to chat along the way, nor does anyone take much notice of Oliver’s indignance in the corner where she left him.

She hopes the diamond gets scratched. No, she hopes it gets shattered into a thousand tiny pieces. _No,_ no—she hopes someone _takes_ it and then eggs his fucking house or something equally annoying as insult to injury. If someone stole the thing, not only would the Hammers never find out what happened to it, they couldn’t even buff out the scratch or sell the tiny pieces for even a little bit of their money back. It would all go down the drain, as they deserve, as Oliver deserves, specifically, because screw his _investment._

If someone stole the diamond, he’d probably be pretty fucking _offended,_ Morgan muses viciously, but as the silk of her mom’s dress comes more clearly into view, his other comments ring in her ears, his thoughts about what her sex means she does and doesn’t understand.

Wait.

Morgan stops in the hot path she was cutting across the event a moment previous, and an _idea_ occurs to her, vindictive and wildly illegal.

If Oliver was watching, he might be properly wary of the near-manic grin that tears her mouth open and dissolves the fury from her features, but he’s in the corner with a stained, probably designer suit.

Good.

Morgan closes the rest of the distance to her parents—

“There’s my favorite teenager!” from her dad.

“Hi, honey,” from her mom.

—and is already running the technicalities of how she’s going to rob the Hammers blind.

//

Morgan begins with the basics, and by the basics, she means the best hacking tech money can buy. For one, she gets into the penthouse’s security system. Considering it’s Hammer tech, that’s not especially hard, but what does make things a little more difficult is the alarm set into the pedestal the diamond is encased on top of. She discovers its existence in the first place because she watches the camera footage of Oliver’s dad setting it up in an unfortunately smart move; the alarm, set to go off if the diamond is substantially moved, isn’t connected to the rest of their security, which means she can’t disable it remotely.

She frowns at the screen of her laptop, sitting cross-legged on her bed. She’s already blocked FRIDAY off her computer and from her room for this particular undertaking, but she still has to be careful. She’d prefer to do this on holograms, see everything laid out in full, but she can’t risk anyone barging in and asking questions.

She could just let the alarm go off, but as soon as the mics around the place pick it up, they’re wired to phone the police. Morgan has spent a considerable part of her adolescence working out with superheroes, true, but she would prefer not to test the physical abilities she might have as a result by running from the cops. 

The logical solution is to steal the pedestal.

Issue: the pedestal is solid marble, and Morgan is a fifteen-year-old girl whose getaway car is a moped. Even if she could carry the whole thing out, her moped has a max speed of thirty-five miles an hour. It’ll slow her down too much, and again, she isn’t interested in running from the cops.

She groans, flopping back on the bed for a long second for the drama of it all before she sits back up to watch Justin Hammer install the alarm again. It takes five rewinds for her to find the answer she’s looking for, and just like at the gala, a shark-like grin overtakes her features.

The alarm is closely connected to the sensors at the very top of the pillar, so if she gets something to laser just below it, she’ll be home free.

Morgan leans back, supremely pleased with her inventiveness. “It’s nice being a genius,” she announces to nobody in particular.

Then, from down the hall of the tower, where they’re currently staying, her mom calls: “Dinner!”

And if in her excitement to get out the door and to the spaghetti she’s been promised earlier that day, Morgan trips over her own feet and a shoe in her path, no one needs to know.

A genius, indeed.

//

Never let it be said that Morgan is unprepared. The night of The Great Downfall of Oliver Hammer’s Sexist Bullshit, she has all her ducks in a row. More than that, she has all her ducks marching in unison and singing songs like the Air Force trainees her Uncle Rhodey has shown her videos of.

As far as her parents know, she’s going to hang out at Riri’s house, one of her friends from school. She has even informed them that she might be late because they’re marathoning all three of the Pitch Perfect movies, which means she has all the time in the world to get this done. 

Her tracker in her phone is off, and after a stop at an admittedly sketchy gas station, she’s switched her t-shirt and favorite leather jacket for a pair of leggings and a sweatshirt, both black. When she gets closer, she’ll put on a ski mask too. Or the domino mask she picked up from a party store. 

(Logically, she knows she should go with the ski mask if she’s genuinely concerned with covering her face, but the masquerade mask is so much _cooler.)_

In the backpack she wears, she has all the tools she needs—filched from the labs at the Compound—including the sticky gloves and socks her dad made for her when she was, like, eight and sad she couldn’t climb walls like Peter.

Part of her says he would be less than pleased with her for using his invention to egregiously break the law, and another part of her says that because she’s bullying Justin Hammer and co., he’d look the other way and help her hide the evidence from her mom.

If this goes well, she’ll never have to find out what he thinks at all, but to bolster her confidence, she revs the engine of her moped. She made sure to plan this for a nice day so that her parents would let her drive, even if her mom says she can’t believe the state of New York lets kids under sixteen drive those nowadays, and as the sun goes down over the city, Morgan speeds off.

At thirty miles an hour. 

She’ll get to the penthouse _eventually_ , alright. Her moped takes her where she goes without the need for parental supervision, and she’s grateful. It’s part of the reason it’s named the Mayflower: if the pilgrims can flee an oppressive rule, so can she, and by oppressive rule, she means the fact that her parents have _way_ too many resources they can use to monitor her.

Besides, her dad is scared of riding anything remotely similar to a motorcycle, and she thinks it’s fitting that the Mayflower shares a name with her aunt, the person her dad fears most, barring her mom.

At the thought, Morgan grins under her helmet, and before long, a ridiculously nice neighborhood comes into view.

She parks in the closest alley and begrudgingly tugs the ski mask on before she creeps down the street. In all her hacking—which is, unfortunately, the most legal part of the operation—she also came across the blueprints for the building, and she knows the window she’s aiming for: four stories up, arched, and impractical, doesn’t technically open or close.

Morgan has a plan for that, but first, she has to scale the damn thing.

After using her phone to knock out the security cameras, she tugs her gloves, flexing her fingers once they’re situated properly. The socks are surprisingly elasticky, and she stretches them over her shoes because NYC is gross and she would prefer not to step in a biohazard in her quest for vengeance. Then, pleased with her set up, she begins to climb.

It fucking sucks.

She’s always hated mountain-climbers when she’s tagged along to her mom’s workout classes, and they’re even worse twenty feet in the air. She doesn’t get how Peter does it all the time, though she supposes he has freaky spider genes to help him out.

Sweat is sticky on the back of her neck and will probably make her freshly trimmed bob stink by the time she’s done. Her arms are screaming at her, and with every step she takes, she curses Oliver goddamn Hammer for forcing her to cause his family problems. Then, she remembers his smug face and _“Girls just don’t get this sort of thing”_ and keeps pushing.

She hasn’t looked down yet, she realizes, maybe halfway there, and decides that’s for the best. She’s already lied to her parents; she can’t chicken out before she breaks the law and makes doing so worth it. 

She takes a few steps and then, accepting that she should really do some cardio or something, decides to take a break. She has time—according to the narrative she’s created, she and Riri would barely be to the Party in the USA scene in the first Pitch Perfect, by her estimate—so she can take a second. Except Morgan, a verified genius except for when she’s being a dumbass, is panting behind the ski mask, so she decides to take it off to give herself a second to breathe.

All goes according to plan for approximately one second. Then, she gets scared about not having both hands on the building, flails for a better grip, and drops it. She watches the fabric flutter in the wind, going down, down, _down_ until she can’t see it anymore.

Morgan wishes she were more upset by it, but frankly, the domino mask has a lot more aesthetic appeal. Granted, her heart stops about three times working it out of her bag and finagling the cheap elastic strings over her ears, but the adrenaline rush makes the rest of the climb less hellish.

Hovering below the window she needs to infiltrate, she once again takes her chances with death as she finds what’s essentially a portable laser hidden away in her bag. Placing a sticky foot on the glass to make sure it doesn’t fall and shatter, she starts cutting a hole big enough for her to crawl through. She’ll admit that eyeballing it probably isn’t the most effective way to go about it, but she’s fueled in her mission by spite, not logistics. It _works,_ alright, and in a surprisingly awkward process, she tucks the laser tool back into her backpack and ducks inside.

She lands, silent as a cat, in a crouch, just like her Aunt Natasha’s taught her, and she holds the pose for a few painstaking seconds, waiting for an alarm to sound, someone to realize she’s there. But the Hammers are at the same event as her parents tonight, and Morgan is going to enjoy the hell out of this.

Breaking: check.

Entering: check.

Now it’s time to commit—according to her research—grand larceny in the first degree in the state of New York.

Morgan likes the way that sounds maybe a little too much, but in her defense, it’s pretty badass. In the darkness of the Hammer penthouse, Morgan grins. Damn, she’s good.

Minding the piece of glass on the floor, Morgan slinks further inside, thinking of the floorplans she studied when she was still trying to figure out how to get past the issue of the pedestal. The living room isn’t _far_ , but the thing about rich people, in Morgan’s lifetime of experience, is that they sometimes have a lot of doors leading to rooms they don’t need—including but not limited to, in the Hammers’ case, a walk-in pantry, refrigerator, and wine cooler—so it’s a careful process to figure out how to get from where she entered to the living room, which is arguably farther away than it should be.

Whatever.

She makes her way down a hallway, and at the end, she stares between a door to the left and another to the right. Why the Hammers have a door to their living room is beyond her—open concepts are much more modern, anyway—and while it doesn’t matter if she gets it wrong, she’d like the satisfaction of choosing correctly the first time. So she stands for a second, thinks, rubs the edge of the domino mask with her pointer finger.

She can’t remember, so she makes an impeccable leap of logic. “Left for living room,” she declares, and is, somewhat surprisingly, right.

A grin so wide it hurts splits her face as she lays her eyes on her prize.

“Fuck you, Oliver,” she murmurs, edging forward with a cursory glance at the cameras set into the corners of the room. She has faith in her hacking abilities and is reasonably sure, being Hammer Tech, that they won’t come back on, but it doesn’t hurt to check, or at least that’s what she tells herself.

She crouches to unzip her backpack. Right on top of the rest of her stuff—her change of clothes, a water bottle, assorted snacks—she finds the laser tool where she left it, and she hums as she flips the switch on it and goes to the pedestal sitting in the center of the room.

The _smell_ is the worst part. Morgan doesn’t know what she expected charred—

_(Is that the word? Charred? She’ll go with it.)_

—marble to smell like, but it’s not good.

(The ski mask probably would’ve helped with that, along with preventing the coating of dust her lungs likely have now, but Morgan’s not going to acknowledge that—even mentally—any time soon.)

She coughs, freezes because she coughed and is expecting someone to jump out and catch her at work, and then unfreezes because _she’s alone, dumbass, now get back to work._

Morgan’s inner monologue is both helpful and colorful, and she thinks that’s great.

The laser is quiet but potent, and Morgan takes care to make sure her fingers stay out of the way. She’s very entertained by the thought of the Hammers trying to figure out why there are scorch marks on the wall. In truth, they’re made from when the laser cuts through to the other side of the marble and Morgan doesn’t turn it off fast enough, but the interior design is ugly anyway. She’s giving them a valid reason to shell out on some redecorating, and hopefully this time, they’ll know better than to put a multi-million dollar trophy on display.

She eyes the diamond from its place within a glass case. It gleams in the orange glow of the laser, shining from every facet of its cut and looking more like a stock photo than something she can theoretically touch, assuming she can pull this off. It’s gorgeous, honestly. Morgan’s never been interested in geology, but any idiot could see that it’s worth a pretty penny. Probably. Hopefully not, actually? Morgan’s plan if she gets pulled over it to say that it’s a prop for a community theatre she’s a part of. And okay, the cover story isn’t great, but she’s workshopping at it. As she’s stealing the diamond. Details.

She shouts when the laser gets all the way through the pedestal, mostly because it makes a burn mark on the couch. It doesn’t set it on fire though, which Morgan appreciates. She’s not interested in an arson charge, and after putting the laser back in her bag, she considers the chunk of marble she now needs to squirrel out of the penthouse and back to the Mayflower.

Well, there’s no time like the present.

While it comes off the rest of the pedestal cleanly, it, unsurprisingly, is still heavy as shit. A breath punches out of Morgan, and she groans as she starts for the door. “Lift from the knees, lift from the knees,” she mutters.

She’s still going to do it because, you know, _spite_ , but not for the first time, she decides she doesn’t have to be _happy_ about it.

(That is very much a lie because, despite the sweat beading on her brow and the ache beginning to form in her arms, Morgan is gloating about the glory of it all but complaining is fun.)

It still sucks to carry around a block of marble, but she makes herself think of the shock that’ll be on the Hammer’s faces, how Oliver won’t have anything to brag about the next time they have the misfortune of meeting, and keeps walking. At the very least, she reminds herself, the journey back to her moped has been shortened.

The security in the penthouse, being Hammer tech, is _weird_ —inconveniently strong in some areas and paper-thin in others. For example, it would take for _ever_ to override the facial recognition that allows the Hammers to get into the penthouse and make it open for her, but locking the elevator so that it won’t stop for anyone else on her way down? That’s a piece of cake.

Morgan sets the diamond down for a second before getting into the elevator and pulls a garbage bag from her backpack over it. It’s not _discreet,_ exactly, but it’s surprisingly hard to find a solid burglary bag, so she’s making do. It’s better than walking around with the diamond out and about, anyway, and with a few taps on her phone, she’s rigged the elevator for her purposes and steps inside.

Morgan is of the opinion that the Hammer penthouse is ugly and impractical and an abomination to the very concept of interior design, but she will say that the building’s choice of elevator music—Bon Jovi—isn’t half bad.

“ _Woooaaah, we’re halfway there—wooaah, livin’ on a—”_

The doors ding open, and Morgan darts through the lobby and into the New York City night fifty million dollars richer.

//

The ride home is uneventful, thankfully. For a moped, the Mayflower makes good time, and Morgan gets back to _her_ penthouse—much more stylish than others she’s seen that night—long before her parents. The lack of supervision makes it easier to bust the diamond out of its confines, and she pulverizes the alarm that goes off with a rubber mallet she finds in her dad’s workshop—miniaturized for the house—until it stops.

Justin Hammer legitimately baffles her because—and Morgan doesn’t know how his company is still in business—the alarm itself doesn’t ping the police. It’s the security system wired to the mics in the living room which are _supposed_ to pick up the sound of the alarm that do, but Justin clearly didn’t plan on someone stealing part of the pedestal.

Dumbass.

Morgan smashes the marble and the glass case on top of it apart, stashes the diamond in her sock drawer, and bags up the trash, which she takes to a dumpster a few blocks away.

When Morgan gets back home from _that,_ she changes into less suspect clothes—her favorite pajamas, to be exact, which are some exercise shorts and an old shirt of her dad’s that he originally stole from her Uncle Rhodey—and flops down on her bed.

She really can’t believe she got away with that.

“Holy _fuck,”_ she breathes.

How the _hell_ did she get away with that? It helps that Justin Hammer and his son are loudmouthed idiots with too much faith in their abysmal products, but _seriously—what?_

Morgan stares up at her bedroom ceiling. “I am a criminal mastermind,” she declares, ignoring the soreness already spreading through her criminal mastermind limbs that just scaled a building.

Then, she turns over, satisfied with a job well-done and with plans to drift off after more exercise than she’s done in one go in at _least_ six months. Except as she’s drifting off, the adrenaline of it all wears off enough for her to truly process that she has a _fifty million dollar diamond_ hidden in her _sock drawer_ and no idea what to do with it.

_Shit,_ she spares the energy to think, and then she promptly falls asleep.

//

Morgan wakes up to the sound of her dad losing his mind down the hall in her parent’s room.

“Pepper! Pepper— _Pepper.”_

“What, honey?” her mom replies, sounding very much like she’s just woken up too.

_“The Hammers got robbed.”_

“What?”

“The Hammers got robbed!”

“How do you know?”

“Uh—how do I _not_ know?”

_“Tony.”_

“I get my news from lots of sources, alright? You’re ignoring the point. They got _robbed.”_

“Honey, the last time you tangibly interacted with Justin was 2010.”

“But he’s still _tacky_ and _horrible_ and—”

“Fair.”

Morgan grins under her blankets, giggling softly to herself, and then, from her mom again, “How much did they lose?”

“Looks like someone stole a diamond he bought off a museum recently.”

“How _much?”_

“Take a guess.”

A sigh. “Twenty million.”

“Higher.”

“Thirty?”

_“Fifty.”_

“Holy _shit.”_

“Right?”

Morgan hears them dissolve into laughter that gets progressively louder, the two of them feeding off each other in a way that would doubtlessly make her Uncle Rhodey roll his eyes fondly, and she rolls over to get comfortable, fully intending to go back to sleep, when she hears her mom gasp out a breathless question: “Make sure you tell MJ. She’ll love it.”

Morgan’s eyes snap open.

She knows what she’s doing with the diamond.

//

Morgan’s plan from the beginning was to donate it to charity. _She_ certainly doesn’t need the gem, but she’s fifteen and the daughter of two billionaires. There’s not a whole lot of ways she could discreetly get it pawned off—especially not without letting her parents know—but luckily, she has a pseudo-sister-in-law who doesn’t like rich people and is the most shrewd person Morgan knows, next to her mom.

If anyone can figure out what to do with the eensy-weensy felony Morgan committed out of sheer spite, it’s MJ, so Morgan starts thinking about how she’s going to make that work.

Her plan is simple, though it does involve some more illegal entering—hopefully minus the breaking, this time. She has Peter’s patrol schedule down to an approximate science, and if nothing else, there’s always the Spidey Watch blog Ned maintains. She’ll check to make sure he’s out—Peter’s super-hearing is _incredibly_ inconvenient when she’s looking to fly under the radar—and then she’ll hang outside he and MJ’s bedroom window until she sees an opportunity to slip inside and deposit the diamond on her side of the bed. Probably with a note? An explanation of sorts seems reasonable, and she recently ordered a pack of sticky notes with cat faces on them, which she’s been very excited to use.

Yeah, she’ll leave a note.

It takes longer than she’d like, if she’s honest. She may think the diamond is the stupidest fucking purchase ever made, but it does feel somewhat blasphemous—the geologic equivalent, anyway—to keep it with socks she’s had since elementary school but hasn’t gotten around to throwing away. However, bar her underwear drawer, it’s the best hiding place she has, so thus, the diamond stays put until her parents take a business trip to Milan and she bunks with her Aunt May for a few days.

“Be good,” her mom instructs her after a peck on the forehead.

“Save some lasagna for me,” her dad says before a kiss on the cheek.

“Love you!” they both call on their way out the door, suitcases dragging behind them, and Morgan feels a _little_ bad about her plans to commit more crimes in their absence. Just not bad enough to not do it.

Morgan is many things, but a coward is not one of them.

She drives her moped to May’s, and Morgan smiles and plays cards while a Disney movie rolls in the background, doing an admirable job of acting like someone who doesn’t have a rock in her duffel bag worth more than the building she’s in.

It’s a step up from the sock drawer, alright?

So she hangs out with May, who, as always, is cool as fuck and also the sweetest person in Morgan’s immediate family, eats dinner—lasagna, as her dad predicted, because it’s the only thing May doesn’t burn—and when May kisses her goodnight, puts on the same gear she wore for the initial Hammer operation, domino mask included.

(She hasn’t had _time_ to get another ski mask, or at least that’s the excuse she gives herself to keep wearing her face covering of choice.)

Wearing her sticky gloves, she climbs down the building—is this how Peter felt sneaking out for so many years?—and mounts her moped. It’s a Thursday, and Peter _always_ patrols on Thursdays because he says criminals are out because they’re excited for the weekend— _“But they’re not really that prepared, you know, because the timing’s not quite right. Who’s ever heard of major crime happening on a_ Thursday?”

Morgan grins as she takes a turn fast enough that, if her dad was watching, he’d yell at her to slow down.

Thursdays suit Morgan just fine, and she makes her way to Peter and MJ’s apartment easily, knowing the route like the back of her hand.

They’ve lived together for years despite getting married about eighteen months ago, even though Ned—raised Catholic—and her dad—connoisseur of harassing Peter—joked that they couldn’t believe the two of them were, quote, _living in sin._

Morgan, for one, appreciates having a place to crash in the event that her parents are being annoying and she doesn’t want to deal with real adults in general. She has a key, and because it’s one of the only desserts both Peter and MJ like, they almost always have a tub of strawberry ice cream on hand. It works, and tonight, she’s going to make it work even better than usual.

Like she did with the Hammers, Morgan parks down the street and gets her gear ready, though is a considerably simpler operation than last time. All she has to do is make sure MJ’s not around, slip in their bedroom, and drop the diamond and its note somewhere she’ll find it. It’s simple, easy, and effective.

It doesn’t mean Morgan enjoys climbing up a ninety-degree angle any more than she did last time.

“This is _ass,”_ she groans, panting for breath. “Why did they decide to live on the top floor? Probably because they hate me, that’s why.”

That is not _strictly_ true because Morgan knows damn well the reason they picked the top floor was because Peter being Spider-Man means he’s not bothered by things like dragging couches up ten flights of stairs and also that he likes being able to crawl down from the roof, but still. Five stories up, she feels, at this point, like the placement of their apartment is a targeted attack against her innocent attempts to make Oliver Hammer’s life a shitshow.

But Morgan Stark is _not_ a coward, and she’s even less of a quitter. She makes her way up to their apartment bit by grueling bit, and when she reaches it, she’s rewarded by hearing MJ in the shower when she presses her ear to the window.

Perfect!

Using one gloved hand, she slides the window open and crawls inside in a very gangly but ultimately successful method of infiltration. Then, she lays on the ground with her limbs starfished around her for a second. MJ takes long showers, anyway, and the water hasn’t even turned off. That being said, Morgan _really_ needs to do more cardio if she’s going to climb buildings without throwing up.

Wait, is she going to continue to climb buildings?

Food for thought, she ultimately decides, but she does need to get going. Sitting up, she rifles through her backpack for the diamond and the note she’s eloquently composed: _The Hammer diamond. Worth a shitton. Put to a good cause. Thanks!_

Morgan thinks the exclamation mark is a nice touch. 

She leaves the note and the glorified rock it was made for on MJ’s side of the bed, and she admires her work for a moment—most notably the fact that she’s setting what was previously a museum exhibit on an Ikea comforter—before heading for the window.

And the several stories she has to traverse again.

The only thing that stops Morgan from letting out a groan is that she hears MJ turn the shower off, and as much as Morgan hates the Hammers, she dearly misses their shittily-cyber-protected elevator as she starts the climb down.

//

Morgan tells herself that she’s done. She got her revenge. She committed a felony. She even has a very fun story to tell in, like, a decade, when her parents probably can’t ground her for it.

Except, the weekend after her stay with May, her dad comes into her room while she’s doing her homework. _“Ma-gun-a,”_ he calls, stretching the word out into a sing-song tone, which is how Morgan knows he has a favor to ask. She looks up from where she’s absentmindedly filling out a worksheet about photosynthesis and cellular respiration and finds his head poking out from the door frame.

A big favor to ask, then.

“What’s up?” she asks, pulling out an earbud.

“What are you doing this Friday?”

She sighs. “What thing do you want me to go to with you?”

“It’ll be fun!”

_“What thing?”_

He scratches at the back of his neck, looking up at the ceiling of her bedroom like it’s the most interesting thing in the world. “Well, here’s the thing, I don’t _have_ to go, but—” He pauses in what Morgan knows is meant to be dramatic effect. “—the Hammers are going to be there, and I want to talk to Justin about the diamond.”

Morgan grins. “You want to _harass_ Justin about the diamond.”

He doesn’t even try to deny it. “It’s so funny, Mo. I haven’t laughed that hard since that time Clint—”

He makes a compelling argument, and she doesn’t need to hear more. “I’ll go,” she interrupts, _“but_ we have to get burgers afterward. And I choose the restaurant.”

Her dad smiles, his face soft and delighted for a myriad of reasons because he’s a fucking dork, sure, but he’s still her dad, and he’s the best. “You drive a hard bargain. I don’t even _like_ burgers.”

Morgan snorts, the deal is struck, and it would be a normal night if Oliver didn’t come to bother her again when her dad goes to bully his. God, she hates Oliver, but she wants to ask about the ramifications of her heist more than she wants to find a new way to assault him.

“Heard you guys had a break-in,” she comments, cutting him off as he tries to talk about where he’s thinking about going to college—Harvard and Yale are allegedly already talking to him, but Morgan isn’t sure she believes they would bother with someone so idiotic. “Lost that diamond you told me about before. What was it, a hundred carats?”

Some might say she’s laying it on thick, but seeing Oliver’s face pinch in irritation is worth it. “My dad is _so_ mad. Like, obviously, it was annoying that the diamond got stolen, but whoever did it cut through one of our windows, and it rained later that night. The hardwood got super damaged because of how long the water sat, and he had to replace that _and_ the window.”

Morgan lifts a brow, hiding her smile by lifting this event’s serving of sparkling grape juice to her lips. “You guys are billionaires. That’s pocket change.”

Oliver, as expected, is a prick and rolls his eyes. “Yes, Morgan, but the noise from the repairmen is _inconvenient.”_

_“You’re_ inconvenient.”

Not her finest work, but it irritates him, which is enough.

“Shut up!” He sticks his tongue out at her, and she does the same in return, though they’re both careful not to make too big of a scene. “It doesn’t even make sense. Diamonds are super inconvenient to steal—you have to pawn them off, and it’s a whole thing. My dad knows a guy who’s so old-fashioned he keeps a ton of cash—like, _millions_ —in a vault in his house, and he’s a total asshole. We’re just, like, existing. Why not rob _him_ instead?”

Oliver sounds rather exasperated, but Morgan is way, _way_ beyond appreciating that simple joy. There are a few things about his little rant that jump out to her—that Oliver’s an asshole himself, hence why his family, however illogically, got robbed, for one—but Morgan just can’t help herself, despite the more mature part of her saying _no, she’s done enough, come on, she should walk away from this—_

“Yeah? And what’s his name?” she asks with a challenge in her voice, and when Oliver plays right into her hands and tells her what she wants to know, another plan begins to form in her mind.


	2. Chapter 2

Morgan is not expecting round two of committing crimes to be as . . . passionate as the first. For one, while Oliver, local big-mouthed idiot, is involved because he told her who her next target should be, there’s nothing personal there aside from her inherent hatred of people who only give to charity for tax write-offs. Except then, she starts actually researching the dude—Edwin Cord, which is the most pretentious name she’s ever heard—and finds out that he contributes to a lot of gentrification in NYC’s poorer neighborhoods and is an incredibly shitty landlord to boot. **  
**

Now, she is legally obligated to rock his shit.

Unfortunately, Cord isn’t stupid enough to protect his fortune with _Hammer Tech_ , so it’s going to require a little more work than last time. Morgan originally starts with hacking, but! It takes _forever_ , and she gets bored. So bored in fact, she leaves her computer open but spins around in her office chair for longer than she’d care to say just thinking.

Cord has security guards posted around the vault, even though it’s in his own house, so she has to find a way to get past those—by synthesizing a tranquilizer, maybe? That sounds plausible, but to utilize that, she’ll need to somehow leave her hands free. Not only is she going to have to scale the building, courtesy of living a life of crime in New York, she also has to stay adhered to whatever she’s crawling on and get to her other tools. She doubts her ability to accurately throw darts with one hand, but how does she work around that?

“What should I _do-oo?”_ Morgan sings to herself, shoving her desk to keep herself spinning. The gloves she uses to climb are effective, but their _only_ purpose is to help her climb. They’re _necessary_ but not very flexible.

Morgan blinks.

Not very flexible in their current state, anyway.

She grabs a pencil and the closest piece of paper, which happens to be the study guide for a test she has the next day, and things get out of hand quickly. Originally, she just wanted the gloves to be more useful, but then that sprawls into the rest of her outfit, how she can minimize fumbling in her bag or risking her mask of choice coming off.

The thing is, while a costume is cool, she has to theme it, or what’s the point?

 _(Not going to prison,_ some might say, but that’s boring.)

Morgan thinks for a second. She can’t ethically abandon the persona she assumed for her first heist, and after a bit of brainstorming in which she dwells on her crime of choice—cat burglary—and her dress code for the Hammer operation, she decides on something that’s not particularly unorthodox but _is_ a statement, in her humble opinion: Black Cat. 

It’s concise, fitting, and very easy to base a costume around.

(And yeah, _maybe_ she likes the thought of being a bad omen to those who deserve it, but that’s a little more thought put into things than she can suavely admit to, so she doesn’t.)

Morgan’s first draft ends up _boring,_ much to her chagrin. A black, glorified sweatsuit—even one with shoulder pads and white faux-fur on the collar for some pizazz—isn’t anything to write home about, though she is excited about making a domino mask she won’t have to worry about the straps snapping off of. It’s a good start, true. The collar makes it distinctive, but it’s lacking _something._ Moreover, Morgan feels like she still might be too recognizable in the event that she runs into someone or gets caught on camera.

She has to think for a while about what she wants to do about that, but after scaling the mask up—and making sure the white over her eyes is less transparent with the updated version—she ends up on an online shop for wigs.

It’s not _her_ fault silver is very trendy right now, and how is she supposed to turn down the one styled almost exactly like her normal hair?

Morgan orders with express shipping, erases the purchase from her credit card history with minimal effort, and two days later, stares at herself with a bob so silver it’s nearly white. She really makes it work, she’s not going to lie, and it physically pains her to shove the box it came in under her bed. Soon, she promises herself, but first thing’s first, she has to make the new suit.

As a result of the several times she’s caused explosions working alone, her dad monitors the activity in his personal lab strictly, so that’s out. _Peter’s_ lab, on the other hand, is much easier to infiltrate, and after temporarily disabling FRIDAY’s surveillance in the room, she gets to work.

It helps that a _lot_ of Peter’s lab equipment is dedicated to making spider suits on short notice due to his talent for getting electrocuted, stabbed, shot, and otherwise harmed, along with his costume, on the job. All Morgan has to do is give the fabric synthesizer basic instructions, and it gets to work.

When all is said and done and she’s suiting up for the first time—in her bathroom with the shower going, in case anyone presumes she’s not naked and gets the bright idea to barge in—she has to say, she’s particularly proud of the gloves. They’re black and surprisingly fitted for all they can do, and most importantly, have functionally useless pads like those of a cat on the palms and fingertips because it’s Morgan’s super suit and she makes the rules.

She flexes her hand in the mirror and watches five white, razor-sharp claws curl in place of her nails. They have a duller option, but with a tap of the sensor she implanted atop her wrist, she’s switched it out for these. They can also shoot miniature tranquilizer darts—guided to veins by a targeting system, primed by touching her thumb and middle finger together, and released by doing the same on the other hand—and there’s a laser built into the index fingers—activated the same way as the darts except with her ring finger. The gloves as a whole switch from sticky to not-sticky by tapping her wrists together.

(It took her a _long_ time to figure out how she wanted to activate that, by the way, because her first instinct was to make it work with a clap, which, while fun in theory, is a wee bit inconvenient for anyone that would like their palms to not be stuck together.)

Morgan’s never shied away from tooting her own horn, and _toot toot_ , it’s all cool as fuck.

She grins at herself in the mirror, ignoring how sweaty she’s starting to get with the steam in the bathroom. She’s always teased her dad and Peter for their attention to their respective superhero appearances, but she gets it now.

Wait.

“Am I a superhero now?” she wonders aloud, but no—superheroes tend to try and follow the law, and she’s breaking it with very little remorse. Vigilante, though—that seems accurate.

Morgan dulls her claws and plants her hands on her hips. “I’m _way_ better than a superhero,” she declares—self-love is important, after all—and a week and a half later, she pulls off her second heist without a hitch.

//

“This is a lot of money,” Morgan says to herself, staring down at her haul, the rows and rows of green she can now see in proper lighting.

And to be fair, it is.

Fucking Edwin Cord’s shit was difficult but not terribly so. Morgan got to take a fire escape most of the way up, for one, and with the hood of her suit up to cover her head of silver, the guards didn’t notice her creeping along the ceiling until it was too late and they each had a tranquilizer dart in their neck. She turned the cameras off ahead of time because, with fifty million in stolen property under her belt, she’s not some _amateur,_ and she lasered right through the admittedly well-hidden vault. It was multiple vaults, actually—Oliver provided a good start to things but didn’t have all the information, which is not surprising, given that he’s a moron—and they all would’ve been more secret if Morgan hadn’t sent a drone ahead of time to scan the place and create a blueprint for her to work off of.

So, now she has two genuinely enormous duffel bags and a backpack stuffed full to bursting with hundred dollar bills. There were two vaults she didn’t touch, probably just as full, but Morgan is limited to what she and the Mayflower can carry.

She hasn’t counted, but she has to have at least five million. In cash. It’s a far cry from the diamond, true, but this is considerably more practical.

(Unexpected side effect: Morgan can now _vividly_ visualize Benjamin Franklin’s face, which is unfortunate because he’s ugly and also owned slaves.)

This time around though, she can’t exactly leave it on MJ’s pillow, and she settles for putting a note on her phone charger and stuffing stacks upon stacks of cash under her and Peter’s bed and deliberately not looking at what else she might find under there in the process.

(Look, logically she knows they bang, but she _never_ needs to see any evidence of the fact.) 

Her parents are back at the Tower having a party with the other Avengers for Steve’s birthday. Morgan feels kind of bad about skipping out early on him, but she got him a thoughtful present—a private class with one of his favorite artists—and thinks that makes up for it a little. She wouldn’t have done it in the first place, honestly, but she’d never flake on her family under normal circumstances, which her parents are well aware of.

As far as everyone is convinced, Morgan is feeling incredibly under the weather, hence why she’s been left to her own devices for the last five hours; they think she’s sleeping off a bad stomach bug, and _everyone_ knows waking Morgan—or her mom—when they don’t want to be bothered puts one at risk for serious injury. Thus, she had plenty of time to rob another asshole to the best of her ability _and_ bring it to her sister-in-law in one fell swoop, and as she starts to break a sweat stashing it all, she hopes MJ appreciates not having to pawn anything off this time.

//

Morgan is fucked. Irrevocably, ginormously, super-duper _fucked._

In hindsight, she should’ve seen something like this coming, but riding the high of having picked her next victim—an asshole bigwig actively polluting waterways in developing countries—without Oliver’s help and pulling off another operation—stealing a lot of said bigwig’s extensive collection of fine jewelry—she forgot that MJ is very, very smart and good at catching people unawares.

Like when she sets up a tripwire by the window Morgan uses to get into the apartment, which then triggers an alarm and a trap that uses some of Peter’s webbing to stick her to the wall.

“Shit,” Morgan says eloquently, trying to tug herself out of her predicament, though she knows she’s shit out of luck without a solvent, and a second later, MJ bursts through her bedroom door with a kitchen knife in hand.

 _“You,”_ she growls.

Morgan thinks about knocking her out with one of her tranquilizers, but without MJ freeing her, she’ll be stuck for at _least_ two hours, probably closer to three. More importantly, Morgan has no way of controlling the way MJ would fall if she passed out, and the knife is really big, so she just swallows and waves with claws she forgets to dull for the occasion. “Uh—hey?” 

A second later, she realizes what she also forgets to do: modify her voice.

MJ’s eyes get big, her mouth falls open, and then in a truly impressive feat of misfortune— _why_ did she decide to be _Black_ Cat, again?—Morgan manages to be even more fucked than she already was.

“What the— _Morgan?”_

“Um—who’s Morgan?” she tries, deepening her voice, but it’s too late. 

MJ’s eyes narrow, and she crosses her arms. Morgan prays that she gets out of this alive. 

_“Morgan. Harriet. Stark,”_ MJ growls. “What the _hell_ have you been doing?”

Morgan can’t even try to hide the wince that follows the use of her full name. _Harriet_ is better than Harold, which was her dad’s interpretation of her parents’ plan to name her after her Uncle Happy as thanks for carrying her mom’s ring for a decade, but it never makes her feel especially warm and fuzzy to hear.

She sighs and leans her head back against the wall and is grateful that, at the very least, it’s not her mom. “It’s kind of a long story—can you let me out of the webbing first?”

//

MJ is pinching the bridge of her nose, and for the first time in her career as a vigilante, Morgan’s wig feels itchy, likely due to her nerves. “So, to review, you started this because Oliver Hammer was a douche, and then you just—what—kept going?”

Morgan shifts from her place sitting with her legs crossed on MJ’s bed. “In my defense—”

“This should be good.”

“—I’m only stealing from people who have money to spare. And also because they deserve it.”

 _And it’s a good time,_ but Morgan doesn’t think they’re there yet.

MJ raises a brow.

“I am! The Hammers deserved it the least out of everyone, and even those guys are jerks. The dude I robbed for the cash is fucking with rent prices in low-income neighborhoods, and the lady I took these from—” She lifts her duffel bag, stuffed with miscellaneous t-shirts to prevent excessive jangling, for emphasis. “—is pumping lead into rivers that native populations rely on to _survive_. They can eat shit.”

MJ’s eyes slide to the side, considering even if she’s trying not to, and Morgan strikes while the iron is hot. “Come on, you know I’m right.”

MJ’s eyes flash, and she jabs a finger at her. 

_Shit—_ shit, _too soon_.

“What I _know_ is that you are fifteen and not supposed to be doing heists as a hobby.”

“At least I’m not fighting crime! I’ve never gotten hurt doing this because I’m _good_ at it. Peter did way more dangerous stuff at my age, and he didn’t have half the resources I do!”

MJ throws her hands up in exasperation. “Peter shouldn’t have been doing it either!”

Morgan rolls her eyes. “Well, he did, and _he_ turned out fine. I’m not fighting supervillains—just, like, redistributing wealth. And, you know, if I can do it in a fun costume, the more the merrier.”

Morgan thinks that’s a great point, and yet, MJ lets out a long-suffering sigh, gesturing to all of Morgan. “Yeah? A costume? And what are you supposed to be?”

Well, that’s just insulting. She has her claws out and everything, even if they are dulled at the moment. Morgan crosses her arms, miffed. “I’m Black Cat— _duh.”_

“Was that a Mean Girls reference?”

“It’s a classic.”

It is! They’ve tried to reboot it, and though the musical is solid, nothing has come close to touching the original.

MJ shakes her head, putting up a hand. “We’re getting off-topic.” A mirror of Morgan, MJ crosses her arms, tipping her chin up in an effort to look more severe. “This is dangerous, and you’re breaking the law. I should call your parents so they can ground you, and _Black Cat_ should never see the light of day again.”

But she doesn’t move to do anything of the sort.

Morgan grins. “Yeah, you should,” she agrees, and then she opens up the duffel and takes out one of the necklaces. _“Or_ you could choose a non-profit the money from this could go to, I could keep pissing rich people off, and on the _off-chance_ I get into a tight situation, good news! I have Spider-Man, Iron Man, and War Machine in my emergency contacts.”

Her dad and Uncle Rhodey may technically be retired, but they’d suit up again in an instant if it meant saving her, she knows that much.

MJ eyes the jewelry, and then she sighs, trying very hard to seem defeated despite the smirk she’s fighting to keep off her face. “How much is that worth?”

Morgan cackles.

//

With MJ in the know about Morgan’s less-than-legal activities, Morgan now operates on a few rules. For one, she has to run all of her plans past her before she can put them into action. According to MJ, especially with the Hammer gig, she has gotten “so fucking lucky” and is also “insane” and “MJ doesn’t know how she’s not in prison.”

Everyone’s a critic, in Morgan’s opinion, but her parents still don’t know about her little pastime, so she’ll let it slide.

Regardless, she also has to text MJ at the end of every job to be sure she’s safe, and they’re going to work together to make sure the profits of what she’s doing go back to the people who got screwed over in the first place, which Morgan feels guilty about not having considered doing from the start.

Also, MJ suggests that she revamp her look.

 _“You need to work on branding. The claws aren’t cutting it,_ Black Cat.”

Well, fine then. Morgan goes back to the drawing board

Her second attempt at a suit is a little on the fancier side, not quite as pragmatic as the sweatsuit but more unique to make up for it, and she starts from the bottom up.

In place of the black sneaker-like foot pieces from before, she sketches white boots—thin but sturdy enough to have small repulsors in the soles—that cut into a V just under her knee. The sweatsuit had a zipper down the middle and a turtlenecked layer under that—climbing a building, practically speaking, isn’t really a tits-out event—and she keeps the concept of the v-neck but ditches the faux-fur for a simple white underlayer with a turtleneck and stiff collar. The gloves, too, maintain all their original functions, but she makes the set for the new suit all-white, and they flare out a little at the wrists.

She has the most fun with the more _feline_ attributes. She puts a black stripe around the neck of the underlayer to give the illusion of a choker—or rather, a cat collar—but the more notable modification is with her mask, which has grown from covering her eyes and some of her cheeks to being a nearly full black helmet— _nearly_ because it leaves her nose and mouth open for activities like, say, breathing—complete with cat ears on top.

It’s almost a full helmet when it’s pulled out, anyway, because the nanotech it uses fits into a headband she can yank down into a true mask.

She has to say, her dad knew what he was doing making an interface inside his suits. Aside from the glowing eyes that narrow and expand like with Peter’s mask, which in and of themselves, are pretty fucking cool, it’s incredibly convenient to see information she wants at any given second.

Naturally, she keeps the wig as is, which even MJ agrees is a good call, and in return for following the rules, Morgan gets answers to a few questions she had.

For example, “How did you pawn the diamond off?”

“. . . I called Ned, swore him to secrecy, and made him figure some stuff out on the dark web.”

“You _what?”_

Morgan might be a felon at-large, but she’s glad some things about her hobby are left to the adults, not that she’d ever admit it.

At any rate, with MJ’s supervision—which she is growing less reluctant to provide by the day—Morgan pulls off another two heists which target a consistently racist singer and an almost-billionaire who’s gotten rich off of fracking, respectively. The singer has a penchant for handbags—Morgan will die on the hill that Birkins are ugly, but they fetch a pretty penny—and as for the millionaire, well, that one’s a cyber attack that happens mostly without her having to watch it go down. Instead, she’s busy breaking into his vacation home and taking random shit in there in a purposefully sloppy maneuver to keep his attention away from more pressing matters until it’s too late.

Some weird-looking paintings she could’ve made in Kindergarten aren’t the most valuable things she’s managed to nab, but a hundred thousand each isn’t bad.

By the time she got to the jewelry heist, it was common knowledge that there’s a high-class thief loose in NYC, but the gig with the millionaire is the one that puts _Black Cat_ on the map because it’s the one where Morgan runs into Peter on her way out.

She shoves the paintings into trashbags—as expensive as they are, that’s mostly because of the pretentious artist who made them, not the size—and meanders her way to the rooftop of the penthouse the millionaire lives in, taking the time to shove an ugly vase off a shelf and onto the floor as she goes because it’s just that gross. Also, fracking is shitty.

She tugs the handles on the trashbags over her wrists, and then she climbs. She’s parked a few blocks south, and it’s subtler to make her way over via roof. With that in mind, she rolls onto the top of the building with a huff, planning on taking a break to catch her breath, except—

“Okay, so, those _definitely_ aren’t yours.”

Morgan looks up and sees Peter, or rather, _Spider-Man_ a few feet away, arms crossed in a clear motion of disapproval.

“Ah _shit,”_ she says. She’s careful to modify her voice after the MJ incident, and she shifts on her feet even as she slowly brings her thumbs and middle fingers together on both hands, then repeats the action before she holds her hands up, as if in surrender. “Okay, I, uh, really don’t want to go to jail, so how about you take the paintings, and I just kinda move along?”

She holds the hand with the paintings hanging off it out, makes sure to dull her claws first, too. 

Morgan might not be able to see his mouth behind his mask, but by the tone of his voice, she knows he’s taken back, might be doing one of his almost-frowns that appear when he’s surprised and isn’t sure he’s happy about it.

(When she steals all the strawberry ice cream or uses his webs for an elaborate prank on most of the Avengers, for example, but Peter doesn’t _know_ that she knows, or he would tell her parents, and Morgan would be a very sad, wealthy corpse.)

“This isn’t your first job,” he points out, but he’s moving closer. Morgan really hopes his spidey sense is doing her a solid and not going off like it would around the average criminal, but she does, somewhat guiltily, have a plan to avoid all of this, so that’s up in the air. “Why are you doing this?”

Morgan flips her shock of silver hair and shrugs, keeping her voice lower and a little smoother than normal because while Morgan Stark doesn’t have any need to be a people pleaser, Black Cat needs to be likable if she’s going to get out of this one unscathed. “Rich people can be assholes, and I’m just settling the score,” she assures him, and then with a grin and a narrowing of her eyes that glow from the LEDs in her helmet, “and a fun costume doesn’t hurt.”

She can _feel_ him raising a brow, his skepticism sharp and colder than Morgan’s accustomed to in the dead of night. “So you’re, like, Robin Hood?”

Morgan only vaguely knows who that is. It sounds right, though, so she nods. “Yeah, sure. It’s not like I keep any of the money for myself. I usually just find out what someone’s fucked up, and then I donate it back to where it got taken in the first place. Plus, I only steal from people who don’t need the money.”

Morgan might be a criminal now, but she has _principles._

Peter looks conflicted. “Uh—I’m not gonna’ lie, I don’t know how to respond to this. I wasn’t expecting you to be a good person.”

Morgan struggles not to preen. She _loves_ defying expectations, and it means the most to her when she gets to surprise her family, but of course, Peter wouldn’t know that. Instead of showing her excitement, she laughs, the sound much more composed than she feels. “It’s chill.” Then, it occurs to her that she has an excellent opportunity to slip in her alias. “I’m Black Cat, by the way, and you can figure out how to deal with me later. Tonight, these—” She shakes her arm, along with the trash bag. “—can be yours.”

Then, she holds out her hand, and the second Peter starts tugging the handles over her wrist, she sinks the index and middle fingers of the hand he’s touching into his palm and does the same motion with her other to his arm.

Morgan’s very grateful she had the hindsight to previously calculate the dose needed to tranquilize Peter—four darts delivered from the four nails she used, which would kill a normal human—in the event she ran into Spider-Man as Black Cat.

There’s a moment where Peter narrows his eyes and manages to hold onto her out of sheer irritation, and then he drops like a sack of potatoes, out cold.

“Yikes,” she says.

Peter, predictably, does not respond, and she takes the time to make sure her brother’s in a comfortable position before she leaves him there to take her loot to his home.

//

“You _tranquilized_ my husband?” MJ shouts, peering at Morgan’s laptop from over her shoulder as she packs money into ghost accounts left and right.

“Just a little!” she insists, wrinkling her nose when her connection stalls for a second. “He’ll be fine! He’s just, like, napping, right now!”

 _“Napping_ on a random rooftop?”

It’s close enough to the truth, isn’t it?

“Okay, first of all, it’s not like he hasn’t done that of his own volition before, and anyway, he could use the rest.”

A sigh. “How much did you get from the cyber attack, anyway?”

A wicked grin carves across Morgan’s face. “Fifteen million.”

“Holy shit.”

“I do what I can.”

MJ scoffs, but as usual, she doesn’t move to stop her. “You should be doing after-school clubs and shit like that—you’re _fifteen.”_

“And _you’re_ an accomplice.”

Another sigh, and then, “If he’s too groggy to do date night tomorrow, I’m turning you in.”

Morgan supposes that’s fair, and she laughs.

//

Following Morgan’s _mild_ physical assault of her brother, Spidey is the one to leak her name to the press, who have been badgering him with questions about when he’s going to stop the terror of the NYC’s elite for weeks. He complains about it at family dinners, actually, and while Morgan tries to find it in herself to feel a little bad about annoying him, come _on_ —she’s his little sister. It’s her _job_ to be a nuisance, and in her free time, Morgan enjoys watching the video where he name-drops her.

In it, he’s just gotten done fighting an _actual_ villain—some asshole that makes himself look like a rhino, to be specific, which, _what the fuck_ —but still gets approached by a local news outlet.

“Spider-Man!” Peter’s head swivels to face the reporter making her voice heard above the melee. “Spider-Man, people have been asking questions after New York City’s most notorious thief struck _again_ last weekend.” That’d be the job with the paintings, sure enough. “Have you met the thief? How do you plan to stop them?”

His scowl, even beneath his mask, is palpable in his voice. “Yeah, she calls herself Black Cat, and I’m—uh—working on it,” he replies, kicking a piece of debris.

The reporter only shoves her mic closer. “Yes, but do you have a timeline for capturing this—did you say _Black Cat?’_

Peter nods, sighs. “Yeah, Black Cat. She has silver hair, cat ears, and claws—you’ll know her when you see her, but come on.” He gestures to the damage behind him, soot still on his brow. “Frankly, the city has bigger issues than someone taking money from people who won’t miss it.”

“But—”

Peter swings off without another word, and aside from being proud that she got something through his thick skull before she knocked him out, Morgan is glad to be building her reputation. 

It’s what Black Cat deserves, alright, and Morgan stands by that.

The issues start happening when she finds that members of the upper class in NYC are offering rewards for information on how she operates.

“Now they’re just not playing fair,” she complains to Riri, at her house and defending Black Cat’s honor because Riri doesn’t know they’re one and the same. “Black Cat’s all on her own, and they’re ganging up on her.”

At that point, Morgan’s been pulling heists for around six months, but Black Cat’s only been revealed to the public for three weeks or so.

Riri shrugs, nose deep in Algebra II and hating it. “I wouldn’t worry about her. She’s clearly smarter than the people she’s bothering. Otherwise, they would’ve caught her by now.”

Morgan sighs. She just isn’t getting this unit, and Riri’s trying to explain it to her, but Morgan’s been less good at _getting_ school in general ever since the consequences of owning a silver wig and a cat suit started taking up increasingly more real estate in her head. “Okay, but still, there’s no need to make her job _harder._ All she’s doing is giving rich people a good reason to, you know, actually think about who they’re hurting.”

“Morgan, you can just say you think she’s hot. It’s okay.”

Morgan’s indignance is swift and entirely undignified but no—no, that is not the conclusion she wanted or expected Riri to come to. “That I— _what?_ No, oh my God, _no._ I just think she’s, you know, justified in what she does.”

“And that she’s hot,” Riri insists, looking up from the problem she’s working on to face Morgan with a shit-eating grin.

The issue is not that Morgan is offended that Riri is assuming she likes girls. She does, anyway, and that’s nothing to be ashamed of besides, but she cannot handle Riri thinking she has a _crush_ on her alter-ego. It’s just—just too _weird,_ and she’s entertaining the thought of revealing her identity just to make her stop looking at her like that.

“I do not!” she protests, throwing her hands up.

Riri rolls her eyes. “Yeah, sure. You’re _super_ convincing. And even if you weren’t attracted to her, Black Cat’s smart enough to just come up with a new way to operate if they find out how she used to do things. Come on, she’s a high-class thief. If she has the means to pull those kinds of jobs in the first place, some rich nutjobs getting their panties in a twist isn’t going to stop her.”

Morgan knows that, for obvious reasons, Riri doesn’t mean to encourage her so directly, but the praise warms her heart a little bit. “I guess you’re right,” she agrees, biting on her pencil’s eraser to stifle a smile. A pause. “You agree that the silver hair is a good look though, right?”

“Oh my _God—”_

//

Riri, for all the shit she gave Morgan about her complaints, is right that she finds ways to outsmart the people after her. The more security measures they throw up, the more she takes down, and when she runs into a firewall she can’t crack, well, then she sends a drone to shoot the cameras and the electricity box out, doing away with anyone’s chance to recognize her and their ability to sound an alarm. The attempts to thwart her are as annoying as they are engaging, and Morgan manages to find a lot of fun in darting around them.

Unfortunately, matching the extra mile her victims are going to fend her off means retiring her latest version of the suit—or at least, retiring it when she can settle on what she wants the newer version to look like. She bemoans the inconvenience to MJ.

“The boots are iconic! Not to mention the collar— _ugh._ Why does the world _hate me?”_

MJ hums, squinting at the textbook for one of the classes she’s taking on her way to another master’s. “Oh, woe is the ridiculously wealthy girl taking the piss on her fellow members of the one percent for fun.”

Morgan sighs, long and loud and with so much passion it nearly hurts. “Okay, that might be true, but you didn’t need to say it. Money can’t buy class, you know. How am I supposed to think up something better than this? It’s already so _good_ —sleek and comfy and everything a girl needs! It has really, _really_ big pockets, and figuring out how to make them discreet _and_ functional was a nightmare. How am I supposed to do that again?”

“Truly a travesty.”

“You know, I’m not getting a lot of empathy here. You’re my super cool supervisor and slash or sister-in-law, depending on how friendly you’re feeling. Don’t you have any ideas?”

MJ looks up. “The only idea going through my head right now is how much I want James Madison to choke. Does that answer your question?” 

Morgan supposes that’s fair. 

Political science is a bitch, and MJ’s said more than once that she has a class she absolutely _hates_ this semester. However, then MJ sighs, running a tired hand through her hair. “But seriously, if you’re going up against more forces than usual, make a suit high tech enough to be able to fight them on the go. However good your planning is beforehand, your bail’s going to be _really_ expensive if you get caught and don’t have a way to escape.”

“But my _aesthetic!”_

MJ lobs a pencil her way, and the eraser hits Morgan’s shoulder. “You’re a smart girl. Figure it out.”

Morgan _harrumphs_. Yeah, she’s smart, but she’s lacking creativity at the moment, and MJ—for obvious reasons—isn’t being particularly helpful. She needs real-time inspiration, so she reaches for the backpack that has exactly one notebook on top of the literal cat suit occupying the most space inside it.

“I’ll be back,” she announces, fixing her wig in place first in a process that has gotten streamlined over the months she’s been active. She doesn’t have a job planned or anything, but it’s fun, sometimes, to run across rooftops because she can, to see the city below her and know she’s serving it well by being a thorn in the side of its worst citizens.

The repulsors she added to the boots of this suit are helpful, at any rate, propelling her farther than her own steadily increasing muscle mass is capable of. Naturally, she plagiarized the base design from her dad’s suits, but no one needs to know that. They’re very discreet, anyway, and if pressed—not that she ever should be, given her tendency to avoid chatting when she does business—she could always claim to have simply been _inspired._

Morgan snorts at the absurdity of the thought, ducking into a roll that the boost from the repulsors makes easy. She’s always enjoyed acrobatics—a result of having Spider-Man for an older brother—but a little extra momentum certainly makes things smoother.

Imagine that, Iron Man’s daughter pretending to merely try her hand at replicating his tech.

Her dad’s cool and all, but Morgan knows that, with varying degrees of effort, anything he can do, she can do better.

It’s after a particularly well-executed set of backflips done thirty stories up that her HUD tells her she has a visitor incoming. Peter, to be exact, but Black Cat isn’t supposed to know that. Half-heartedly, Morgan forces herself into a crouch, low and poised on the asphalt of a roof. It makes her side twinge—a result of the sit-ups she did in PE the other day—but she’s trying to keep Spidey off her back as long as possible.

Thankfully, he puts his hands up as soon as he lands. “You can relax—I’m not looking for a fight,” he assures her.

Well, for all his snark, Peter’s always been a terrible liar.

Morgan straightens up, taking an active effort not to wince at her side again.

“Pinky promise?” she asks, slipping into the more feminine voice she’s attached to all of Black Cat’s interactions, now. She figures it’d be pretty hard for someone random to hear her and think _oh shit, Morgan Stark_ , but one can never be too careful when they have a few felony charges to their name.

(She _thinks_ she’s at ten now? Maybe? She hasn’t done a headcount recently.)

He sighs, shaking his head in what she tags as amusement. “Sure, but we’re not actually going to do the motion. I don’t need you to stab me again.”

Morgan can’t stop herself from laughing, and furthermore, she can’t stop her laughter from being a wee bit maniacal. 

Peter glares, and she spreads her hands in apology. “Sorry—sorry, it’s just—it’s a little funny.”

“It is not,” he protests. “I had a date, and I was too out of it to go. _And_ I had to call out sick from work.”

Oh, _boo-hoo._ Morgan sincerely doubts JJJ is going to miss a few pictures of Spider-Man he can use to publish libel, but she can’t _say_ that because then Peter is going to think he has a stalker.

“Yeesh, whine much?” she responds instead.

“My wife was pissed!”

Now _that_ complaint is warranted. MJ sent Morgan some very ominous texts the night after the painting heist. However, she didn’t turn her in as threatened, so even though Morgan is mysteriously missing all of her fuzzy socks—why MJ decided to be _that_ malicious, Morgan doesn’t know—she counts it as a win.

“My bad?”

The glare intensifies. “You do _not_ feel bad.”

Well, no.

“Oops.” Morgan doesn’t appear very sorry with the shark-like grin smacked across her mouth, but it’s not _her_ fault it’s fun to fuck with Peter. He’s just a very easy person to rile up, as both her and her dad know. “Alright though, if you’re not here to, like, arrest me, why show?”

Peter hums, scuffing his foot against the roof. “Would you believe me if I said I’m really, really bored?”

She would—Peter regularly complains about Tuesdays being the absolute worst—but Black Cat isn’t the type to admit that.

“And that’s your only reason for hanging out with me? Ouch.”

She can feel him rolling his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, whatever. You’re getting a rep, you know. Apparently, rich people don’t like it when they can’t find out who keeps robbing them blind.”

“And that’s the way I like it.”

Peter laughs, and Morgan feels her wind-swept wig tickle her cheek. “Yeah, they’re pretty fucking weird, not gonna’ lie. I have some family that’s, like, loaded, and I love them and all, but their decision making is _so_ messed up. I’m like _I broke my fridge_ and they go _cool, I’ll order the most expensive one I can find as a replacement.”_

Morgan can’t help but snort. That’s definitely aimed toward her dad, and it’s not like she can defend him without sounding suspicious. Therefore, laughter will have to suffice. “How’s the fridge?” she asks, already knowing the answer.

Peter sounds less than pleased, but the fridge has been the subject of debate forever. “It has a _touchpad._ Why is that necessary?”

 _Convenience, duh,_ Morgan Stark would argue, but Black Cat just laughs again, only for Peter to cock his head and look at her. “You know, as much as I enjoy trashing rich people, you’re not usually out for no reason. Something on your mind?”

Morgan blows out an utterly _enormous_ sigh. “I need to upgrade my suit if more people are actively looking to arrest me, and I don’t have any good ideas.”

“Hm,” Peter muses, and oh, Morgan didn’t even consider that she’d be able to pick his brain for this sort of thing. Peter _never_ stops thinking, and she does her best not to seem too eager to hear what he has to say, though she knows that whatever he has to offer is going to be useful as shit.

Not one to disappoint, Peter opens his palm and a hologram appears above it of Black Cat in her current suit. “Let’s take a look,” he suggests, and Morgan leans in for a better view.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The making of the Black Cat suits!!! More robbery!!! Calling out gentrification!!! MJ!!! Queer Morgan!!! This chapter has it ALL babey—Thank you for taking the time to read it, and an especially big thank you to anyone who commented on the first chapter. Ily!!
> 
> Also, if you haven’t already, please take the time to check out the _gorgeous_ art linked in the notes of the first chapter/the end notes—I love it and Ali to pieces.


	3. Chapter 3

“Keep your eyes _closed,”_ Morgan’s dad commands, and then, “Round the corner, Pete.”  


“Aye aye, Captain,” he replies, steering Morgan by the shoulders.

“You guys are so cheesy,” Morgan complains, but she’s smiling as she stumbles blindly towards some big surprise her dad has for her.

“Give them a break, Mo,” her mom chastises, and she can hear May and MJ giggling as the five of them make their way down the stairs of May’s apartment. “It’s not every day our _little girl_ turns sixteen.”

Now she’s just trying to get a rise out of Morgan. It’s her dad who actually gets hung up on mushy stuff like this, but the worst part is that it _works._

If Morgan’s eyes were open, she’d roll them. Instead, she settles for a long groan. “Mo- _om,”_ she protests, and she can feel someone, presumably May, as she’s the one to speak next, swat the back of her head.

“Quit complaining!”

“It’s my _birthday_ —I should be able to complain if I want to!”

“Tony, honey,” her mom cuts in, voice soothing, “please stop bouncing down the stairs. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

Morgan snorts and can feel the breath from Peter doing the same ruffle her hair. Her dad does kind of bounce when he gets excited, especially when it’s something to do with their family, and she can imagine the magnitude of the grin on his face as he replies.

“I’m fine! Helen’s in town, anyway. Pete, just pick her up. It’ll be faster than guiding her down the stairs blind.”

Morgan blinks, processing, and then she shouts as Peter scoops her up with zero goddamn warning. “Oh, fu—”

May and her mom at the same time— _“Morgan.”_

 _“—rick_ you for that one,” she amends somewhat sheepishly, but she keeps her eyes closed and her hands gripping Peter’s arms. She knows, logically, that it’d be pretty fucking hard for Spider-Man to lose his grip, but it’s still nice to feel a little more secure when someone is hoisting her into the air.

Her nose wrinkles at the breeze that hits her face as she hears a door open and they walk outside. She honestly has no idea what her dad’s plan is, but she hopes it goes quickly—she didn’t bring a sweatshirt, and it’s a little chilly.

“Almost there,” her dad hums.

“I was against this, for the record,” her mom announces to the group at large.

MJ laughs. “Oh, how bad could it— _oh my God.”_

Morgan might make fun of her dad’s flair, but now she has to know what got that reaction from MJ.

“Let her at it,” her dad instructs Peter, and as soon as Morgan’s feet hit the ground, her eyes fly open to find a shiny, pitch-black motorcycle parked on the street, much faster than her moped and therefore _much_ more suited for illegal activities.

It’s the most gorgeous thing she’s ever seen, and MJ must know as well as Morgan does what it means for the future of Black Cat.

“Holy _shit,”_ she breathes, mouth gone dry, and then her eyes _glitter_ as she gives her dad—who wears a smile big enough to hurt—a hug so tight he loses his breath.

This is the best fucking day of her life, and not even MJ’s impressively tired expression and the hand she’s rubbing down her face can dull the excitement mounting within Morgan both for the thrill of upcoming rides and what, exactly, she means to do to the helmet webbed to the handlebars.

//

Morgan texts MJ later that night.

_Morgan: i can commit so many felonies on that thing_

_MJ: I am going to kill you, and your dad is an idiot._

To err on the side of caution, Morgan hides the pack of fuzzy socks May gifted her.

//

“Oh _hell yeah,”_ Morgan enthuses as she holds her motorcycle helmet between her palms and sits on a table in Peter’s lab. She’d wear a helmet as Black Cat no matter what—crime never sleeps, and neither does Morgan’s wariness of traumatic brain injuries—but this makes it so much better. “How did I not think of this before?” she muses, running a fingertip along her absolutely brilliant addition to Black Cat’s costume: retractable cat ears set into her helmet.

They’re not huge, but they’re there, two petite triangles to let anyone on the streets of NYC know exactly who _not_ to fuck with.

Morgan thinks they’re amazing and also the best thing she’s ever come up with.

“It’s hard having great ideas all the time, but someone has to,” she hums to herself, and just to check their functionality, double taps a section of the helmet that covers her jaw. On cue, the ears retract, and the deceivingly undisturbed curve of plastic in their wake does a beautiful job of ensuring she doesn’t have to find somewhere to hide another whole _motorcycle helmet_ specifically for her extra-legal activities.

She sets the helmet off to the side and pulls up a holographic model of her plans for her next suit. It’s _almost_ there and ready for production, but she’s still fine-tuning the details by using Peter, or rather, Spider-Man as a sounding board.

As a matter of fact, when she told him about the cat ears on the helmet, he was very supportive.

“It helps to establish a brand,” were his exact words, and Morgan agrees wholeheartedly.

She taps to make the ears appear again, then has them retract, and repeats the process because it’s cool and she can. However, in her excitement, she kind of forgets a little detail, which is that tonight is her monthly movie night with MJ—always scheduled on one of Peter’s lab nights with her dad because, obviously, they’re cooler than them—until she’s reminded by a buzz from her phone.

_MJ: 27 Dresses starts at 6:30 whether you’re here or not._

Morgan shouts and scrambles off her bed, and in her rush to get on the road, the image of Black Cat’s latest design is left glimmering in the air.

//

“I’m _he-re,”_ Morgan bellows outside the apartment door.

It feels strange to enter that way, honestly, but alas, it’s not dark enough to discreetly scale the building.

MJ opens up a few seconds later, and Morgan enjoys the scent of gratuitously buttered popcorn drifting out of the door as she raises a brow. “You decide to be annoying _and_ five minutes late?”

Morgan grins. “It’s part of my charm.”

MJ laughs and slings an arm around her shoulder to lead her inside, and Morgan only realizes a second later that she’s wiping her wet hand on her shirt.

“Hey!” she protests, but MJ just holds her tighter through her shouts and cackles.

“Shut up and get the popcorn,” she replies, and Morgan scoffs before doing as asked.

27 Dresses might be ancient by now, but it’s a good one, and besides, she doesn’t know about her brother across town walking into his lab to grab a prototype and instead finding a hologram laying out for him to see.

//

They’re forty-five minutes into the film when the door bursts open.

Both Morgan and MJ jump, and while Morgan sees MJ pilfering through the couch cushions for one of the guns she stashes around the apartment to make sure no one looking for Spider-Man finds his wife defenseless, _she_ spots the figure all but _vibrating_ with emotion in the doorway.

“Peter?” she asks, studying the line of his mouth, the clench of his jaw, the balling of his fists, all somehow jagged with what she realizes is _anger,_ undiluted and fierce, as he stalks forward, brows raised in a dangerous expression of disbelief.

Morgan _knows_ Spider-Man’s a big deal, alright. He has a list of defeated villains a mile long, and she’s seen him perform feats the rest of her family—and yeah, she’s talking about the _whole_ family, parents and aunts and uncles and all—couldn’t dream of.

It still takes her by surprise when she’s given a reminder about just how intimidating he can be.

Peter tosses a projector onto the coffee table, surprisingly gentle for all the rage visibly thrumming through his body. “Karen, pull up the Black Cat design,” he snaps, every word taut and ready to snap, and not even the AI dares to speak back to him, following the order soundlessly.

Morgan is no stranger to the thought _wow, I’m fucked._

It’s not the most familiar to her, true, prone as she is to succeeding via sheer determination at whatever she puts her mind to, but she’s had her fair share of unfixable situations. They’re humbling, really, like that one history test she forgot about and ate absolute shit on, or when her parents caught her erasing the reminders about fall conferences from their e-mail, or, most recently, when MJ fucking Rube Goldberged the apartment to catch Morgan parading as Black Cat.

Staring at the slowly rotating hologram of her cat suit, this might take the cake.

She doesn’t attempt to deny it.

“I can explain,” she tries, uncharacteristically meek, but Peter doesn’t give her the chance.

“For someone who’s a literal _genius_ , this is a really stupid thing to be doing. You know that, don’t you? You _have_ to know that.”

Well, Morgan’s never been particularly skilled at shutting up. “It’s fun,” she defends herself, trying to sort out what to say, how to explain, because while she hates arguing with Peter, hates the caustic, sinking _thing_ it creates in her stomach that makes her nauseous, she still has to convince him not to tell her parents.

“It’s _fun?”_

Admittedly, that might not have been her best opener.

“I didn’t mean for it to go this far! Originally, it was just to—you know—get back at Oliver Hammer because he was being a dick. And then—uh—one felony led to another, I guess?” His expression manages to darken further, and Morgan backpedals because _oh, right, probably not her finest word choice._ “One _job_ led to another,” she amends. “It’s a challenge to figure out how to pull heists off, so it’s _really_ engaging.” There, that’s a better way to put it than _fun_. “And I know I wasn’t honest about actually being Black Cat, but I didn’t lie to you when we talked! I don’t keep the money for myself; I give it away to people who need it. I know it’s not exactly _legal_ , but it’s for a good cause!”

Peter blinks, unswayed. “I was willing to believe that Black Cat—a functioning _adult_ —could pawn the stuff she takes, but you’re a Stark—there’s not a businessman in the world who doesn’t know who you are. There’s no way you could do it discreetly, so how do you deal with the money?”

Oh dear.

Morgan panics, and her eyes slide to MJ, who is also atypically quiet. Peter follows her gaze, and his eyes widen in shock. “You—you _knew?”_ he hisses.

MJ winces. “In my defense—”

“She’s fifteen!”

Morgan frowns. “Sixteen, now.”

MJ shoots her a glare— _right, not the time._ “In my _defense,”_ she repeats, “you know nobody’s going to be able to stop her. Like, you know, no one could stop _you.”_

“Okay, but I wasn’t—” Peter splutters.

“What? Breaking the law? Pretty sure vigilantism is a crime, tiger.”

“Well, I’ve never _repeatedly_ committed felonies as Spider-Man.”

MJ nods sagely, and Morgan tries to shrink into the couch, content to let them duke it out. Privately, she’s trying to decide if she can escape, but she knows how good Peter’s reflexes are, not to mention MJ would kill her for skipping out when she’s bothering to defend her. “You’re right—” she acquiesces, and Morgan wilts a little, except, “—you’ve just defied the Sokovia Accords, which were signed by, what, a hundred countries?”

“One hundred and seventeen,” Morgan provides helpfully.

“Those were messed up and needed a lot of amending, and both of you know that,” Peter snaps, then focuses on Morgan again. “I’ve been keeping up with reports about the damage you’ve been doing. They’re estimating, but you’ve stolen at _least_ a hundred million. You’d go to _prison_ for that, Mo, for a long time.”

The nickname claws into a cord within her, something ropy, stark against the pure joy she gets from her work, something tinged with guilt—for making the people who love her worry—and a little bit of fear—of getting caught—that she shoves down when she’s actively being Black Cat.

But while Morgan partially does what she does for kicks, there’s something stronger than that in there too. It’s hard to seem firm with a popcorn bowl in her lap, but Morgan straightens up, rolls her shoulders back, and stares Peter down.

“Fantastic. That means a hundred million is back with people who actually need it.”

“That’s not the _point,_ and you know it,” he growls.

“It’s not?” she scoffs, voice getting louder with the heat of the argument. She may hate fighting with Peter, but like any Stark—or Potts, for that matter—she can give as good as she gets. “Because I mean what I told you, even if you didn’t know it was me. Every single person I’ve stolen from has deserved it.”

“It doesn’t change the fact that it’s illegal!”

MJ cuts in then, _wicked_ sharp and with a tight current of anger running through her disapproval. “Just because something’s against the law doesn’t mean it’s wrong, Peter.”

Morgan’s mouth snaps shut. She knows that tone of voice—her mom pulls it when either her or her dad go too far in a fight and need to be reined in—and she also knows it means she should quit talking now. She squirms back into the cushions and lets the fight unfold.

“She might not be _wrong_ , but she could still go to jail! How can you justify covering her for this? Lying to me and Pepper and Tony?”

“Oh, _please._ As if you don’t understand why someone might lie about having a secret identity—you’re going to have to find a better point than that to argue. And I already told you! It’s not like _I_ can stop her! And if I tell Tony and Pepper, she’s never going to trust me with anything again. With me, she has supervision and, you know, someone who would know to call in backup if things went to shit. It’s better than letting her go it alone, and you know it. You’re just mad because she didn’t tell you.”

“I’m fu—” Peter takes a deep breath in, out, though Morgan can see how much effort it takes him to choose his words a little more carefully. “I’m _mad_ because my little sister is a felon, and you’ve been _helping her_ behind my back. How did you find out, anyway?”

Even with the intensity of the argument, Morgan flushes down to her toes and looks away. God, she hates this story, and MJ manages to sound smug through her narrow-eyed, flinty fury. “She crawled into the apartment to drop off her latest loot, and I caught her in a booby trap.”

“Like—like fucking _Home Alone?”_ Peter splutters, looking from Morgan to MJ and back again, and Morgan supposes he did an admirable job holding his tongue a few seconds ago, so whatever.

“Yeah, like fucking _Home Alone,”_ MJ retorts, even more self-satisfied than before as she throws Peter’s words back at him. They’re staring at each other, and though both of them are in clothes that are half a step up from pajamas—neither movie night nor lab time with her dad call for a formal dress code—they both look puffed up and righteous and _pissed._

Not for the first time, Morgan thinks that, even in the throes of the biggest fight she’s watched them have, they’re perfect for each other.

Peter deflates first, blowing out a long, tired sigh, and MJ watches him for a beat longer—a jaded general, even in leggings and an oversized t-shirt, making sure the enemy has properly retreated—before allowing herself to relax in turn. He angles himself to face Morgan again, but that’s loads better than the harsh jerks of his neck as his attention pinballed between her and MJ before. “This is reckless and dangerous, and you could get hurt doing it, and then Tony, Pepper, and May will kill all three of us.”

Morgan skirts the question with an astute observation. “You know, aren’t they just us but older?”

_“Morgan.”_

Right.

She sighs, then, too. “I’m sorry for stressing you out and not telling you, but I’m not stopping. I’m _helping_ _people,_ and I’m probably the only person who could do what I do and get away with it. I have the brains, the money, the background, and if I get caught, I’m lucky enough to have SI’s lawyers to break the fall. That’s _power._ Don’t I have a responsibility to use it?”

In the corner of her eye, she sees MJ place her hand over her mouth to conceal a smile, and Peter ages years in seconds as his hands rise to rub at his temples. “This is a two on one fight. I’ve been set up to fail.”

“Come on, Peter,” MJ presses. “You know we’re right.”

His shoulders slump, and he lets out his longest sigh yet. “Spider-Man should be against this—this _scheme,”_ he reasons accusingly.

“But?” Morgan prods, perking up.

 _“But_ you make a really good argument, and my wife’s going to get mad at me if I make you stop being Black Cat without more evidence that it’s not working out.”

“Hell yeah she will,” MJ says through a grin, and she crosses over to him to push up on her toes and peck his lips, making Peter brighten instantaneously.

Morgan gags. “PDA is _off-limits_ on movie nights! We’ve established this!”

“And _we’ve_ just established that we’re covering for your ass, so we get to bend the rules,” Peter responds, kissing MJ back a little harder—just enough to send Morgan into another round of retching—as she giggles.

By the time they get settled back on the couch, they have to rewind considerably, and the movie is just resuming when a question appears to Morgan: “You didn’t tell my parents, right?”

Peter barks a gross-sounding laugh. “Nah. I found the hologram and told Tony I was tired, so we’d have to reschedule.” A pause. “Besides, if I did, you’d be dead by now.”

“That might be the truest thing you’ve said all night,” Morgan replies, and after a few minutes of watching James Marsden’s and Katherine Heigl’s characters fall in love, Peter poses a question of his own.

“Hey, if you’re Black Cat, doesn’t that mean you tranquilized me that one time?”

Morgan hums. “Let’s focus on the movie,” she suggests.

_“You little—”_

//

If she had to put a name on it, Morgan would say she’s in the high-profile thief equivalent of limbo. And she _does_ have to put a name on it because MJ has been teasing her about how restless she’s gotten without a proper heist to plan for.

The reason for it all is that now that Peter knows, he’s forbidden her from doing any tangible jobs until he can get the weaponized suit up to his standards, and it’s taking for- _ever_ because he has things like _a real job_ and _prior commitments_ to deal with. It’s annoying, but though he’s mostly cool with Black Cat, Morgan’s still toeing the subject carefully, which also means she’s playing nice about being functionally grounded.

As a temporary solution, she’s come up with a suit that’s the exact opposite of the monstrosity her brother’s stuck his nose into.

Interest in 2000s fashion has waned and waxed over the years, but Morgan and her mom’s enduring penchant for rom coms ensures she knows one thing for certain: Juicy Couture can eat their heart out. Morgan out-designed their tracksuits on a whim one especially boring Friday night, and that’s a fact—fuck subjectivity.

It’s essentially her first suit all over again, but she dropped the hood, added more fur—on the backs of her arms and calves, specifically—and built boots into it versus the sneakers from before. Being mostly cotton, the tech in it is limited, but that’s alright; Morgan didn’t build it for anything fancy.

Black Cat was originally made to shove it to rich people, which is a conversation Morgan and Peter have rehashed more than once on a handful of rooftops—

“Eat the rich, Peter.”

“You _are_ the rich!”

—but Morgan’s not picky where assholes are concerned. Thus, she uses the new sweatsuit for a few lower-end operations, like sneaking into her school after-hours to vandalize the principal’s desk because he’s a dick about dress code or robbing a grocery store with a _creep_ of an owner.

She can’t decide if the picture of her dropping a bag stuffed with non-perishables at a local food pantry—along with the cash she swiped from a few registers—that surfaces a few days after the grocery store gig is good or bad. 

(She’s looked into it, and while she was right to assume that the alleyway she left the bag in didn’t have cameras, apparently some guy living _above_ the food pantry is a bit of an insomniac and caught in her in the act. Sigh.)

On one hand, it helps her ever-improving public image, which has been gaining traction since social media deciphered that there’s overwhelmingly some kind of corruption preceding an attack from Black Cat. On the other, she doesn’t like being caught on film because it gives people who don’t like her something to look at—analyze.

“I thought cats were supposed to be sneaky,” Peter quips when she shows up in his lab disgruntled about the whole thing.

“I cut the cameras in the store—I’m not an _idiot,”_ she growls back. “How was I supposed to know that some guy would be keeping an eye out for me?”

“Rookie mistake,” Peter teases, unbothered.

Morgan throws the closest thing to her—a surprisingly heavy pen—at him, but because he is the most obnoxious person to ever exist, his hand flies up without looking to catch it. “I’ll kill you,” she threatens, looking for something else to chuck his way. “I’ve tranquilized you before. What’s to say next time I don’t just up the dosage and—” She draws her finger across her throat and makes a garbled sound for emphasis.

Peter hums. “Huh. That doesn’t sound like what someone who wants to see her new cat suit would say.”

Wait.

 _“What?”_ Morgan hisses, hopping off her perch on a table and running over to where Peter’s working at record speed. “I thought you said it wouldn’t be ready until next week!”

“Oh, yeah—I lied because I knew you wouldn’t get off my back if I told you it was almost done.”

“You are the worst brother I’ve ever had.”

Peter scoffs. “I’m the _only—”_

Morgan pokes him with a screwdriver, hard. “Nuh-uh. You’ll _stay_ the worst brother I’ve ever had unless I get my suit, like, _now.”_

Peter rolls his eyes, but there’s no heat behind the motion as he rolls on his spinny chair to another part of the workshop. “So _bossy,”_ he complains.

Morgan flips her hair. “I’ve never been bossy a day in my life,” she says through a smirk.

Peter snorts, but Morgan’s too busy staring at the lump of fabric he pulls from an especially out-of-the-way cabinet to care about continuing the banter.

She can’t stop herself, really.

She launches herself across the room faster than she previously knew she could move to take it from him, and if Morgan was paying attention to anything other than the masterpiece she holds up to see in full, she would be annoyed by the mirth dancing in Peter’s eyes along with no small amount of pride at his craftsmanship.

“Up to your standards?” he asks, probably in response to Morgan’s gobsmacked glee.

“This is the coolest shit I’ve ever seen, and my dad’s Iron Man,” she admits as her eyes rove over the design so sleek it nearly sparkles. It’s innovative but not unrecognizable from Black Cat’s previous incarnations, practical but not lacking panache in any way. “FRIDAY, how much longer will my parents be in their board meeting?” 

“Approximately two and a half more hours, Maguna,” she chimes, programmed to address her by her dad’s favorite nickname for her and only by the nickname, though Morgan’s long past being annoyed by it.

“I’ll be back,” she tells Peter without looking away from the suit, making a break for the door. “Don’t blow anything up without me.”

She can hear his protests— _“That was_ one time!”—but she’s already on her way.

//

Look, Morgan knows she’s something of an icon—as her normal self, too—but this? This is _glorious,_ and she _preens_ as she takes advantage of her new suit’s abilities to erupt through the ceiling vents and into the lab, making Peter jump embarrassingly high for someone with super hearing.

“Can’t you hear me coming?” she asks while he presses a hand over his heart, clearly having a moment.

“I was _focused,”_ he hisses.

She hums, a deceivingly sympathetic motion for the asshole move she immediately makes after doing so—“Rookie mistake.”

“Oh, screw you.” Peter scowls, which is too bad because throwing his words back in his face? Morgan’s a comedian for thinking of that, but they’re getting off-topic.

“Hush!” Morgan cuts him off before things get further derailed. “Look at me! Look! At! Me!” She twirls for dramatic effect, and to his credit, Peter does give her a well-deserved once-over. She stops spinning for a second, spreading her arms in delight. “I think the shoulder pads are my favorite part.”

Peter sighs, but he’s smiling. “Oh no, don’t say anything about the state-of-the-art safety features or the repulsors I managed to streamline to fit in a souped-up leotard—the _shoulder pads,_ that’s where it’s at.”

Morgan rolls her eyes. “Quit being so dramatic. It’s not like you cared about any of the security Dad put into your suits. Shoulder pads are _fun_ and _exciting_ and add style!”

What she said is true, and she stands by it, but truth be told, the whole suit is eye-catching—yet comfortable—and above all, perfectly _her._ Of all her suits, it’s certainly the most protective, though since that was the goal, she’s glad. There’s a good amount of chest armor, which provides safety _and_ support where it matters.

(And Jesus, does it _matter_ when Morgan is flipping around and crawling on ceilings and running across rooftops.)

The plating on her forearms and shins helps with that too, but the white of it on the gauntlets and boots it forms, respectively, have a little more tech lying under the surface, so it makes sense. Peter wasn’t kidding when he said he streamlined the gauntlets from her dad’s suits, but it’s hard to get a blast strong enough to be used offensively without a little bulkiness. The rest is much the same as before, stretchy, black cotton around her abdomen and thighs to let her move as needed, but the accents are where things pick up again.

Morgan has white outlining the shoulder pads—to be specific, a white that emits light like the LEDs in the eyes in her helmet, which she also jazzed up with a little decal between the ears to match—but more importantly, she has a glowing white _collar,_ complete with a bell.

It’s cute as hell, and when she flicks it, it activates the speaker inside to make a tinkling sound, which is both an entirely unnecessary addition to the suit and a delightful innovation she justifies by telling herself it’s good for branding.

There are, of course, some other surprises tucked into the suit, but Morgan doesn’t care about those as much as her aesthetic in the moment. When she says as much to Peter, he sighs. 

“I really wish I was surprised by that,” he says, but Morgan’s mind is already spinning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, the joy of writing siblings harassing each other.
> 
> Apologies for the delay on this update—my life has been Very busy recently, and after submitting a big assignment, I finally got some time to sit down and edit this bad boy. Thanks for waiting, and thank you, as always, to everyone who takes the time to leave kudos or comments!!!
> 
> Also, if you’re looking for some more content for this au, Ali is the best ever and drew more art for it, which can be found [here!](https://sreppub.tumblr.com/post/636515110985285632/random-phone-doodles-runaway-baby-is) If you enjoy it, please give it (and her!!!) some love bc it’s what she deserves.


	4. Chapter 4

“Hey Mom, Dad,” Morgan begins. They’ve all set up camp in the kitchen to do work together—stocks and product development versus multiplying and dividing polynomials, but still, work—and Morgan has some suspicions she needs confirming from two people she knows have an _absurd_ amount of business resources and know-how. “How do you guys feel about Wilson Fisk?”  


Her dad pushes his reading glasses—his use of which Morgan has been sworn to secrecy about—up his nose as he squints at some report or another. “He’s definitely a criminal, but it’s hard to pin anything on him. He’s into organized crime, probably. Not my area of expertise.”

Her mom raises a brow. “I don’t know how _you_ would know that,” she muses, shooting a quick glare to her dad, who does an admirable job pretending like he hasn’t done some probably-illegal research, “but I _am_ inclined to agree. He does lots of philanthropy work, but he’s never left a particularly warm impression on me.”

“That’s because he’s a crook,” her dad offers helpfully.

Her mom swats him on the arm, but her eyes are kind, if a bit curious, when they turn back to her. “Why do you care?”

Morgan shrugs, circling her answer for a problem. “I’ve been tracking Black Cat, and it seems like he might be a viable target.” Instead of copying down the next equation from the textbook, she starts on a list of names to back her next point up. “Some of her victims have already been under public scrutiny, but other ones are kind of off the radar. No matter what, people are usually able to dig up _something_ corrupt about them to explain why she’d go after them.”

“Hasn’t Peter met her a few times?” her dad asks, leaning in to see what she’s writing.

Morgan shrugs, not wanting to confirm or deny. “I think so? I’m not sure, honestly. He runs into a lot of people on patrol—I lose track.” If Peter were there, he’d be very, very irritated at her feigned ignorance, and that makes Morgan feel all warm and fuzzy inside, so she continues. “But basically, I think it’d be fun to predict where she’ll go next. Fisk is in her price range, so as long as he’s doing something to warrant getting robbed—” She trails off, and her parents look intrigued.

“Should I be doing something about that whole mess?” her dad wonders aloud, and Morgan’s stomach swoops because no— _no._ She’s thought about robbing SI to avert suspicion in the past, actually. If she tries, she can outperform her dad here and there, but he’s very smart and has been in the game a lot longer than her. Black Cat does not need Iron Man—even retired—keeping an eye on her, and Morgan prefers to not get her ass handed to her, which will be inevitable if her parents ever find out about her little hobby.

Morgan laughs and hopes it doesn’t sound too nervous. “I mean, only if you want to be lame. She’s not so much a criminalas a _vigilante,_ you know, and it’s not like she’s attacking _people.”_

(The numerous security guards she’s tranquilized probably wouldn’t agree with that, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Her dad opens her mouth, and Morgan continues to offer her two cents. “And rich people don’t count. We’re, like, evil mostly.”

Her mom raises a brow. “Your dad is a retired superhero.”

 _“And_ a former war profiteer. So are you, by the way. Black Cat has a point about all of this,” Morgan insists. The whole warmongering thing is a touchy subject, but her parents haven’t shied away from telling her the details of their past; if they remember its impact, Morgan should too. “You should let her do her thing. You’re reformed, now, anyway, so she shouldn’t target you. It’s nothing you guys need to worry about.”

A pause, and then Morgan’s mom hums, tucking a lock of silver-streaked ginger hair behind her ear. “I do like it when things aren’t our problem.”

Her dad nods, going back to his paperwork, and Morgan thinks that’s the end of it, except—“You know, honey, if you think she’s hot, you can just say it.”

Update: Morgan would take having her ass handed her over dealing with this.

“I do _not!”_ she shouts, but her parents just side-eye each other and giggle like kids on the playground.

“Whatever you say,” her dad drawls, unswayed, and while Morgan is going to lose her fucking mind, more importantly, she promises herself that Riri is _never_ going to find out about this conversation.

//

After getting her parents’ input, Morgan does her research, looks into police records and even some stuff from the FBI, and starts finding a trail of laced drugs, fucked-up debt collection, and in some cases, bodies. At the _time_ , it seems exciting, but she knows MJ and Peter won’t approve and censors her reasoning for going after him. A little. A _bit._

“I’m going to rob Wilson Fisk for having shitty business policies,” Morgan tells them, staring at her phone so she can’t crack under the pressure of eye contact, though in all fairness, Fisk _does_ exploit his employees, too.

“What’s the plan?” MJ responds.

“Who the fuck is Wilson Fisk?” Peter asks.

Morgan spares the energy to think _yeah, that’s on-brand_ , and then proceeds to seriously downplay the severity of Fisk’s crimes.

In her defense—and really, she shouldn’t be blamed for her actions because _it runs in the family_ —she’s a genius, but she’s also really stupid. And by that, she means while she makes it to the hall after robbing Fisk’s absurdly large safe, she isn’t _quite_ expecting the amount of security that greets her, armed to the teeth and tragically unfriendly-looking.

“Hey guys,” she tries, waving her inconveniently slow-to-activate claws, and just before something connects with the back of her head, she muses—not for the first time and, given her track record, certainly not the last— _wow, she’s_ fucked.

//

Morgan wakes up bound with rope to a chair which, frankly, is lacking in style _and_ creativity.

“If I’m coming up with gorgeously designed cat suits, you’d think _someone_ could put in the same level of effort,” she mumbles, mostly to herself, as she tries to make sense of her pounding head and the harsh white light coming from overhead. She scans the room she’s in and finds it rather bare—another cliche, and honestly, is she the only one even _trying_ —save for her chair and the cameras in the corners of the ceiling.

The back of her head feels wet and sticky and itchy because of it, and with a _supremely_ displeased scrunch of her nose, Morgan realizes that not only is she incapable of scratching it, her wig’s probably been ruined with blood.

“Oh, _fuck_ this,” she announces to no one in particular.

Should she have expected a little more from who she’s pretty sure is a mob boss? Yeah. Is this still annoying? Double yeah.

“Come on,” she yells, “can I at least get some company? Know who’s taken the liberty of tying me to a chair?”

She thinks that’s fair, and though it takes a couple more minutes of shouting— _“This is boring!”_ or _“You fuckers are so unoriginal,”_ to name a few of the things she comes up with—she’s eventually rewarded with the sound of approaching footsteps, which reminds her—

“Activate alert 17-A,” she mumbles, barely audible even to herself.

She’s, like, eighty percent sure she’ll be able to get out of this on her own—she’s been giving herself a wrist cramp by using her claws to slowly saw through the rope—but a little backup never hurt anybody.

(And if it’d be kind of cool to kick ass with her older brother, that’s a thought that is _never_ leaving Morgan’s head.)

The footsteps come to a head, and the door slides open to reveal a genuinely _enormous_ man.

Morgan’s seen plenty of pictures of Wilson Fisk in her research, but despite seeing him dwarf everyone he stands next to, she wasn’t prepared for his full _presence_ , solid, a wall of muscle and man and beady eyes that are _burning_ as they stare at her.

When she pushes down the fear from the pesky things called her survival instincts, Morgan’s kind of flattered she pissed him off that much, honestly.

“So, Black Cat, is it?” he says, and his voice is gravelly, though still more composed than the irritation simmering in the hard lines of his face.

“You got it,” she admits, not seeing the merit in lying. The whole _point_ of her costume design was to make herself recognizable, anyway. “Now, I realize there might be some hard feelings about that little episode back there, but I want to assure you, I only tried to rob you because you’re a huge dick.”

Fisk does not appear to be a _happy_ man in the first place, but his thin lips manage to press themselves into an even more unimpressed line than before. “Chatty,” he rumbles.

“Ominous,” Morgan comments in turn. “Believe me, you can’t be better at the silent treatment than my m—” _Wait,_ wait _, that’s incriminating_. She clears her throat. “Than someone I know, so it’d probably be better to just give up now.”

He walks closer, his footsteps deliberate and somehow thunderous in their stoic, unyielding trek to stand closer to her—to tower above her, more accurately.

Morgan’s not that tall regardless—5’5” isn’t bad, but it’s nothing to write home about—but she especially resents having to look up at her kidnapper when she has rope burns and a wrist cramp. His jaw clenches, and something is going on behind his eyes that Morgan isn’t privy to and isn’t sure she wants to be privy to. She finds that she has much more courage when she _isn’t_ intimately aware of how much her captor wants to physically harm her, funnily enough.

“I recognize this intimidation tactic,” she begins, “and it’s not going to work because I don’t want it to. Mind over matter and all that.”

“Aren’t cats supposed to be stealthy?” he hums in that same low, foreboding tone.

Morgan rolls her eyes, though she realizes the action isn’t visible behind her helmet. “Aren’t mob bosses supposed to be better at scaring people?”  
  


Fisk cracks his knuckles, chuckling like something straight out of a movie. Morgan’s halfway through forming an insult about overdone tropes when he speaks again. “And what’s given you the idea that I’m up to anything like that? I’m just a businessman, Cat. If you were just a little less _involved_ in my private matters, I think we could come to an agreement.” 

He leans in, his face inches away from Morgan’s and oddly open after his offer for someone she can see weighing the pros and cons of beating the shit out of her.

She hums. “First of all, I think we both know that mob bosses and businessmen have about the same levels of integrity.” Yeah, her dad typically uses that lack of discipline to find out classified information and fuck with the government these days, but she knows how these things go. “Second of all—” She leans back as much as she can in her chair, and when she comes forward, she uses the extra momentum to put more force behind the spit she aims at Fisk’s face. “—like _fuck_ would I ever stoop to working with someone like you. You _suck._ Remember what I just said about robbing you? I thought guys like you were supposed to have better memor—”

His fist cracks across her cheek _hard,_ knuckles splitting open the skin there, and Morgan cries out. The chair rocks with the force of the blow, making her scared, for a moment, that it’s going to fall over, but it just skitters a few inches to the side, along with her.

“How disappointing,” Fisk says. “I was hoping a woman as smart as you obviously are would have more sense.”

Morgan hates that she’s a little flattered she has the skill to convince someone out to kill her she’s a woman, not a girl, but she makes herself focus.

“Yeah, because it makes so much sense to work with people who have the means to kidnap you. Shut up, dude. I’m not buying what you’re selling.” The snark rolls off her tongue, now with a touch of real irritation from the pain she was just put through. There’s a moment and only one moment—because Morgan has a personal policy against these things—where she reminds herself of her dad because of it, but she shoves off the thought, especially because her aunts, uncles, mom, brother, and sister-in-law would all crow with delight to see her admit it. “Why don’t you let me go now, before this has to get messy?”

Fisk laughs, and the sound is grating, the amusement of a man who doesn’t believe he’ll lose. “Your hands are bound, Cat, literally. Ever since you first appeared to terrorize my city, I’ve kept tabs on what information about you has been available. You may be smart, but you’re not enhanced. The ball is entirely in my park, but I appreciate you trying to play. It’s entertaining.”

_(“Girls just don’t get this kind of thing.”_

_“The diamond’s an_ investment—”

 _“What, did I_ offend _you?”)_

Well, it just fucking figures that the reason for her starting all this would come back around. Morgan’s skin crawls with the dismissive, pleased way he’s looking at her, as if she’s a problem already settled, and she promises herself that she will personally be clawing his smarmy smirk right off his face.

“I’m sure you’ll be very entertained when you have to go to the hospital for facial reconstruction surgery,” Morgan agrees, ice crept into her tone. Her previous good humor is rapidly evaporating, leaving behind a stony rage that’s not at all unfamiliar.

More than anything else, Morgan _hates_ being underestimated, so now she’s obligated to prove Fisk wrong.

“Silence, Cat,” he orders, holding up a hand, and Morgan _bristles_ in her chair. If she was the literal version of her namesake, all her hair would be puffed up in offense.

“Did you just fucking _command me—”_

“I’m not interested in empty threats. Now, what I’d like to know is who you are under that helmet. It’s one thing to pin you like this, but I’m not going to kill you this time—not when you have so much _potential_ and several of your heists have been . . . disadvantageous for people I’ve had falling outs with.” He stares at her, and it occurs to Morgan that he genuinely thinks she’ll cave.

At the mere thought, she tosses her head back and cackles, her anger temporarily overpowered by the sheer hilarity of that assumption. “Oh, fat chance. I’ve never said anything I didn’t want to in my _life_ , and I’m not about to start now.”

Fisk’s expression, then, turns sourer again, less assured, even as he begins to slide his sleeves up and clench his fists. “Don’t make this more difficult than it needs to be, Cat. You’re a hard woman to unmask, true, but all technology caves to force eventually.”

Morgan thinks of several examples off the top of her head of situations where that’s not true—Chinese finger traps and oobleck, to name a few—but she keeps those to herself in favor of rolling her eyes. The second time, she makes sure the action, even unseen, comes through in her voice. “Yeah, no _shit_ it’s hard to get this thing off me. It has touch ID, among other things, dickwad. Who do you think I am? An idiot?”

Morgan’s kind of thinking that she’s an idiot right now, to be perfectly honest, but that’s _not the point._

A muscle in Fisk’s jaw twitches, and Morgan has to say, she’s really enjoying pushing this dude to the brink. He’s used to sly smiles and people trying to manipulate their way into gaining the upper hand, not pure obnoxiousness, which Morgan can provide in spades—thank you Peter and her dad for teaching her how.

“I _think_ you are testing my patience,” he replies, voice roughening, and Morgan’s grin is _wicked_ as it carves into her face, sharp as daggers at its corners and winking in the fluorescents like the finest of silver.

“Yeah? That’s a shame. You should try and show me why that could be a problem,” she challenges, and as Fisk cracks his neck, she lets one claw hover centimeters over the last threads of rope keeping her restrained.

One meaty fist rises for a crushing blow, and Morgan slashes her hand across his lips.

He stumbles back, howling, and she pounces, propelling herself forward with claws out and ready for their prey. She scratches across his cheek and forehead when he gets too close, grabs him by his tie when he stumbles in her direction in an attempt to land a blow. The blood dripping into his eyes screws with his trajectory, and she catches him across the chest before prepping a tranq dart.

Morgan’s honestly not a very violent person—frankly, she’d much prefer to watch someone burn at a distance, which is definitely evidence that Pepper Potts, CEO of Stark Industries, is her mother—but when she’s pushed, she can find herself taking a lot of joy in absolutely _annihilating_ someone.

Exhibit A, using over a decade’s worth of combat training from her family and the equivalent of ten hand-held knives to make Wilson Fisk bleed.

“Don’t _fucking_ tell me what to do,” she snarls, and when she’s sure he’s in too much pain to substantially fight back, she grabs him by the lapels of his shirt. “Where’d you put my loot?”

“My men will kill you,” he spits with no small amount of blood dribbling down his face. “They’ve been instructed to check in after ten minutes of our conversation.”

Morgan’s eyes narrow, and she presses her fingers together and holds them to Wilson’s throat to create what is essentially one very long, sharp blade. “And? Maybe I’ll kill you to make it even,” she hums, and a sliver of dangerous glee has leaked into her voice. She’s _most likely_ bluffing, but Fisk doesn’t know she’s a sixteen-year-old girl whose parents would be very mad if she caught a murder charge. She is the thief that’s gleaned a hundred million from New York’s wealthiest, that has a highly weaponized suit with generally unknown capabilities at her disposal, that escaped Fisks’s clutches with minimal effort and has his blood dripping from her claws. _“Where is my loot?”_

Morgan is way too close to an old rich dude that’s not her dad for comfort, and he stares at her, his breath hot and puffing up at her face, crimson splotches spreading across the stark white of his button-down, a glare full of nothing but deep-seated _hate_ emanating from his pig-like eyes.

Then, he caves. “Two halls to the right and in the first door on the left, but you’re dead if you go for it,” he growls.

“Don’t get involved with my business again if you’d like to keep your assets,” she hums back, voice gone eerily level and downright _glacial_ , and then she sticks the tranquilizer in his neck.

//

When she stands up, her wig is bunched awkwardly under her helmet and already stained with blood besides, and she discards it on Fisk’s shoes before she leaves the room.

//

To what she feels is her credit, Morgan gets to the room with her haul fairly easily, and that’s mostly because she both takes the ceiling and tranquilizes anyone who gets in her way. When she enters the room, however, she encounters some _issues_. Namely, the gunmen in her way.

“Fuck,” she says eloquently.

A second, maybe two, passes, and Morgan is running different outcomes in her head, hoping against hope that just maybe she’s not going to, like, straight-up _die._

Then the eyes on her shift just to the side, and their owners match the sentiment she expressed a moment ago: “Oh, _shit,”_ the man closest to her mumbles.

Morgan finds out why a second later when a red and blue shape barrels past her and throws him into a wall, quickly followed by the three other men in the room, and sticks them there with a series of well-placed webs.

Peter turns toward her, and his voice is _less-than-pleased_ filtering from the mask covering his narrow-eyed, gritted-jaw face. “Hey, _Black Cat,”_ her brother seethes, and Morgan tries to play it cool.

She waves, skipping forward to collect the duffel bag and backpack left against the back wall. “I was wondering when you were going to show up,” she chirps. “If you don’t mind, I’m just going to collect my things so we can get go—”

“Why the _fuck_ did I have to find you with four _guns_ pointed at you?”

“You know, I’ve been told I can be a little irritating from time to time, but aside of that, I can’t say.”

“You said he was a _businessman.”_

“First of all, we should probably start heading out before more of his men find us. Second of all, he is! He’s just not super, like, _ethical_ about it, and he sells drugs along with stocks. No biggie!”

Morgan is of the opinion that she’s being very diplomatic about things; she hasn’t even mentioned the murders Fisk is probably responsible for, but even with his mask, Morgan can feel Peter’s eyes bugging out of his head. 

_“Drugs?”_ he hisses as they run for the door. “You robbed the _mafia?”_

“Just a little?” she defends herself. “In the scheme of things, I didn’t take that much because I’m limited to what I can carry. Fisk just got all bent out of shape about it. Oh—head’s up.”

A man rounds the corner of the hall they’re charging down—Morgan doesn’t really know where she’s going, but that’s why she has Peter—and when Peter swerves to the side to make room for her, she automatically flings a tranquilizer the man’s way. His knees buckle, and his jaw makes a satisfyingly solid _thunk_ when it hits the ground.

(Black Cat’s never been in a _fight_ before. It’s not quite her style, blood and bodies slumping to the ground in place of a velvet tread and shadowed handiwork, but God, it feels _great_ to let loose.)

“Is that what I looked like when you did that to me?”

“I think you need to get over that.”

“Just so you know, I’m going to tell MJ everything about this.”

“Jerk—fuck you too.”

“You deserve this one, sorry,” Peter replies, his voice not at all apologetic. “Also, you really shouldn’t cuss.”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“I’m going to let them shoot you.” 

Morgan ducks behind Peter as he says as much, letting him web up another gunman. “Where’s the window you came through?”

“How do you know I came in through a window?”

Morgan rolls her eyes. “What kind of lame-ass superhero takes the front door?”

“Touché. It’s just a few more halls over. The concrete in this place threw off your tracker, but I got in and followed the sounds of you beating Fisk’s ass.”

“You know, I’ve been told that people really shouldn’t cuss.”

“I am breaking my moral code to aid and abet a criminal, and _this_ is the thanks I get.”

In her stomach, Morgan feels a twinge of guilt. For obvious reasons, she appreciates having Peter come, but she genuinely does feel bad about what she’s asked of him. Spider-Man doesn’t need a man like Wilson Fisk on his back, and Morgan also knows he tries to follow the law, which she is inarguably on the wrong side of. 

She bares her claws menacingly at a guard with his shaking hands up, who drops his gun and _runs_ at the sight, and then clears her throat. “Well, thank you for coming for me. And for the suit updates. I would’ve been screwed without your help, and—uh—” She has to say it. A bit of gratitude isn’t going to cut it here, and with effort, she gives him an extra inch or two. “—this is fun. So, you know, I’m glad you’re here.”

Peter doesn’t say anything for a moment, barrelling towards one of their opponents and tossing him over his shoulder and into a wall. Then, as he stands in front of the open window the man was trying to keep him from, a light exhale that’s Peter-typical levels of _annoying_ before he speaks: _“Aw,_ you do care.”

“You have no evidence,” Morgan growls, and as they go back and forth about suit recordings and AIs, Morgan climbs onto his back and they swing off into the night.

//

“Okay, first of all, you can’t kill me because my mom and dad would get really mad at you.”

“Under the circumstances, I’d think they’d understand,” MJ hisses, even as she paws through the bag starting to tear with how full Morgan stuffed it with cash. “Tell me why you _lied_ to me, your sister-in-law-in-the-chair who so graciously covered your ass and risked Pepper Potts’s wrath in doing so, and went after the mob.”

“I mean, I didn’t really—”

“Ned’s in town. We were having best friend night, and _my_ husband had to get his leotard on—”

“My _leotard?”_

“—and leave to go save you. Do better.”

From the couch, Ned looks at Peter impishly before covering what Morgan suspects is a smile with the back of his hand.

She sighs, and MJ starts counting bills with a steely glare. “I knew he deserved it, okay, but I knew you two wouldn’t let me go after him if you knew _everything_ he got up to, so I left out a little information.”  
  


“Like that he’s literally gotten people _murdered?”_ Ned exclaims incredulously from the couch, and it just _figures_ that he’d side with them.

“Come _on,_ Ned. You can’t even try to back me up here? Fisk thought I was useful, so he didn’t even try to kill me. Peter was _way_ closer to dying with the Vulture at fifteen, and I’m sixteen! This is a generational improvement.”

“I retract my previous statement,” Ned backtracks quickly upon being faced with MJ’s warning stare. _“Please_ leave me out of this.”

“You helped MJ ditch the Hammer diamond! You’re already _in!”_ Morgan protests, then winces when a hand she uses to gesture flings back too far and hits the bruise left where Fisk hit her.

Ned shakes his head, but his hand has fallen to expose that oh yeah, he’s _definitely_ grinning now. “One and done, Mo.”

“Hey, quit bothering Ned and put this on your face,” Peter interrupts them two seconds before an expertly-thrown ice pack lands in Morgan’s lap.

“He bothered me first!”

“Put it on your face before my wife kills you.”

“MJ threatens to kill me all the time; the fear factor is wearing off.”

Peter raises his brows at her in a challenge, and Morgan brings the ice pack on her cheek.

 _“Anyway,”_ MJ begins again, looking up and directly at Morgan, who shrinks from her gaze, “while I think your dedication is great, if you ever try to deal with someone you _know_ is going to try and hurt you without telling us again, your parents are going to find out about Black Cat.”

Morgan studies MJ’s features, their severe cast, the subtle but immovable downturn of her lips, and decides _not_ to pick that battle. Truth be told, she does feel bad. Spider-Man is now, on some level, associated with a criminal, and that’s going to be inconvenient for him. On top of that, she probably gave MJ a heart attack, and she told her back when this started that she wouldn’t lie.

“Alright,” she concedes, far softer than normal. “And I already told Peter, but I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you worry.”

“Well, you _did._ Your vitals shouldn’t be allowed to do that, and it freaked me the hell out that you need to call Peter in. You scared the shit out of me,” MJ snaps but, afterward, takes one deep breath, then two, then three before she eyes Peter. “What do you think?”

“Think of _what?”_ Morgan asks, lost.

Ned giggles, and though Morgan squints at him, he offers no hints, only a stupidly pleased grin. “Someone’s in _trou_ -ble,” he hums, and Morgan barely has time to be annoyed before Peter speaks.

“Two weeks.”

MJ whistles. “Damn, you’re nice. I was going to make it three.”

“Could you guys be _more_ cryptic?”

“We’re discussing how long you’re grounded for.”  
  


A beat.

_“What?”_

“No Black Cat for two weeks, and not just going out,” Peter explains, crossing his arms, and despite how uncomfortable he looks with taking on some authority in the situation, Morgan doesn't see how she’s going to get out of this one. “No hacking, scheming, thieving, or any other feline-adjacent activities.”

Ned wheezes on the couch despite the unappreciative _looks_ Peter and MJ throw his way, and Morgan thinks she hears him garble something like “Did you just say _feline-adjacent activities?”_

Morgan throws her hands to her sides. “You two can’t _ground_ me! You’re not my parents!”

MJ smiles, a cool, unsympathetic thing. “You’re right—we’re just the people covering your ass to them.”

Now, _this_ is why Morgan hates arguing with MJ—how is she supposed to come up with something to refute that? Instead of trying, she visibly pouts, and she does _not_ crack a smile when Ned gets off the couch, puts her headband on, and pulls it into her mask, except he looks at her and does a little hand motion, and—

“You think it’s funny,” Ned teases.

“Fuck off,” she replies.

 _“Language,”_ Peter and MJ chastise her at the same time, and a moment later—

“Oh my God,” Peter says with dawning horror, “we sound like Tony and May.”

And as Peter and MJ press their hands over their mouths in despair, Morgan is vindicated.

//

Morgan listens to the rules Peter and MJ set. _Mostly._ Mostly!

She’s a teenager—she should and does allow herself one exception: she orders a new wig for when she’s unleashed again. Actually, she orders two because if she has more issues with blunt force trauma in the future, she doesn’t want to have to wait for another one to get in. Aside from that, though, she behaves.

Being Black Cat might be Morgan’s favorite pastime, but it’s not so great for her grades, even if she hates Shakespeare—no matter how cool her English teacher tries to make him—and hates writing her paper over A Midsummer’s Night Dream even more. Regardless, it has to get done if she’s going to get a pedicure with her mom, so she makes something up about symbolism and turns it in.

She ends up getting her toes painted purple, and her mom gets blue, although it takes her a _long_ time to decide what shade: “Morgan, honey, should I do navy or a pastel? Don’t look at me like that! I’m going to Aruba next week, and I’ll be in sandals—answer the question.”

She settles on a powder blue to Morgan’s lavender, and while they sit and get back massages from the salon chairs, they show each other cat videos, which is a whole other layer of irony Morgan isn’t touching with a ten-foot pole—she got enough of that in the English paper.

As for her dad, the driving lessons he forces her into whenever she hangs around the house for too long aren’t exactly _fun_ —he’s so _dramatic;_ if she can drive a motorcycle around NYC and not die, there’s no reason for him to grab the ceiling handle in an Audi—but the waffles they get afterward at their favorite hole-in-the-wall are divine, even if he does give her shit about eating praline syrup.

“What are you? An eighty-year-old man?” he mumbles through a mouthful of food.

“Nah, that’s you,” she snarks back, and he nearly chokes.

It’s solid, a nice breather, but by the end of the two weeks, Morgan is out of her _mind_ with the urge to get out of the fucking house and cause some mayhem, which she starts by finding Peter on patrol—he put a tracker in her suit, so she thinks it’s only fair that she returns the favor—and showing him the two cartons of eggs she’s carrying in her bag. 

To his credit, he doesn’t ask if she paid for those, which is nice because the answer would be _no_ —she picked them up from the convenience store she robbed a few weeks back because reviews on Google say the owner’s still being the fucking worst to women.

“Please tell me you’re giving those to a family-owned restaurant or something,” is how he greets her, and Morgan smirks with a toss of her new wig.

“Not quite. How do you feel about practical jokes?”

“I would rather get stabbed than hear Pepper’s reaction to the Tower getting egged, and I’ve already purposely pissed Sam and Bucky off this week.”

Morgan snorts. “What you lack in creativity, you make up for by being able to keep pace with me. Come _on._ I just want to pay a friend a visit.”

“What _friend?”_

“You’ll find out,” Morgan promises, already using a mixture of the adhesive abilities and repulsors of her suit to make her way back to the ground. “Hurry up,” she calls, “unless you _want_ to be the lamest superhero in this city.”

She gets to the seat of the Mayflower Junior, also known as her motorcycle, and takes just enough time starting it to hear Peter call her a not-very-nice word. Then, she revs her engine and is on her way to harass the Hammers one last time.

//

After egging the _shit_ out of the Hammers’ penthouse, Morgan generally returns to her old routine of research, prep work, and robbery. Getting back into the swing of things, she starts small, snatching high-demand products from a warehouse, collectible art pieces from celebrities’ houses, questionably sourced jewelry from a high-end shop. From there, she returns to cyber-attacks and cash grabs, and one Saturday night when her parents and May are out, she has a little _incident_ happen, and by incident, she means she misjudged how much power from one of her repulsors she would need to bust through a door and fell through a window.

“Are you even _trying_ to be gentle?” Morgan hisses as Peter rubs Neosporin on yet another cut. She doesn’t know how many he’s done at this point, but she’ll be confined to long sleeves in the coming days because she has band-aids _everywhere._

“If you didn’t put your whole body through a window, I wouldn’t _need_ to be gentle,” he hums in response, smearing another glob of salve on a spot on her back. The suit unzips from behind, and Morgan’s just glad she decided to wear a sports bra tonight.

She grits her teeth against the sting of the cut, her motorcycle helmet sitting a few feet away and the top half of her suit pooled around her waist where MJ isn’t lifting it to stitch tears in the fabric.

“It’s not like I _meant_ to do it,” she mumbles, but there’s not too much heat to the words. Truth be told, Peter and MJ have plenty of experience with this sort of thing and know what they’re doing, even if it does kind of hurt. Besides, they have a while to fix this mess, including sorting out what to do with Morgan’s trusty duffel bag, partially unzipped to expose rows and rows of hundred dollar bills and resting on the kitchen counter.

Her dad doesn’t drink anymore, but he doesn’t mind driving for and otherwise supervising her mom and May. When the three of them get talking, they can stay occupied for hours, and last Morgan heard from her dad, the bartender brought her mom and aunt free tequila shots. They’re out of the picture, but Peter and MJ are very much _not_ and are trying to give her updates on the state of her post-window situation.

“I don’t know, Mo, you might have to keep this here for a few days or just synthesize a new one. This thing got pretty torn up,” MJ muses.

“I _feel_ like it got torn up,” she quips back, closing her eyes to let them work. She’s always tired after a heist, but the window really topped it off this time.

She doesn’t know how long she sits there, only that eventually, Peter hums under his breath. “Well, sounds like some people had a good night.”

Morgan squints her eyes open and finds MJ with her tongue poking out of her mouth and working on a cut on one of the sleeves. 

“Did a group just walk in?” MJ asks absentmindedly, and Peter nods, privy to the information with his stupid good spider-hearing. Their collective attention is still elsewhere, but it’s nice smalltalk.

Their attention is elsewhere, anyway, until Morgan hears sloppy, heavy footsteps coming up the stairs, accompanied by a solid amount of whining—“If the two of them don’t agree to come out with us, I’m going to be so _sad,_ Pepper.”—and subsequent caretaking—“May, please watch your step.”

MJ’s hand pauses mid-stitch, Peter drops the tube he’s working with, and Morgan is suddenly much, much less tired.

“Fuck,” Morgan says, and _shit,_ they’re down the hall and getting closer by the second.

“How did you not realize it was them?” MJ hisses to Peter, throwing her hands up as she frantically looks around, presumably for some answer to their predicament.

“I was _distracted!”_ he whisper-yells in return, and now he’s fumbling with the back of Morgan’s suit, trying to find the zipper as they inch closer, stick a key in the door and begin to wiggle it—

“I got it, Tony! You’re in the way—you’re in the _wa-ay!”_

“Pepp, I can help if you just want to let me—”

Morgan’s mom, dad, and aunt open the door to the Parker-Jones apartment to find nearly a million in cash sitting out, Morgan half in her cat suit and cut to pieces, and MJ and Peter close to murdering each other with a sewing needle and Neosporin, respectively.

For a moment, silence, and in a previously unmatched second of self-reflection, Morgan considers that while her life of crime started at a gala, it’s going to end here and now with her death. Then, at last, as Morgan, MJ, and Peter collectively fail to hide their winces, the voices of the three others in the room ring out in tandem: _“WHAT THE F—”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That’s a wrap!!! I’m so excited to have all of this fic out there—I absolutely adored bringing Morgan’s character to life, and I’m very, very grateful to anyone who’s given this au a chance, especially if you’ve commented. I can’t tell you how happy reading my readers’ thoughts makes me!
> 
> If you haven’t already, please check out the art linked in the work notes—Ali is a miracle worker and also amazing, and she deserves all the love in the world for the pieces she’s done for this au.
> 
> Thank you for reading, and I hope you all have a healthy and happy 2021. <3

**Author's Note:**

> Y E A H B A B E Y. This fic has been in the works for a few months now, and I am _so_ excited to share Morgan being as chaotic as humanly possible with the rest of you. To summarize Morgan’s personality in this, have the words of my pal sreppub on tumblr: “the level of petty and privileged u have to be to burglarize someone's diamond for fun.”
> 
> That being said, this fic will be approximately 24k in full and is already completely written, with chapters going up as they’re edited!
> 
> Thank you to [sreppub](https://sreppub.tumblr.com) and [dredfulhapiness](https://dredfulhapiness.tumblr.com) for listening to me yell about this batshit au and being so supportive; you guys are the best.
> 
> Also!!! Sreppub is a literal ANGEL and has made art for this au, so if you enjoyed reading this, please show it and Ali some love [here](https://sreppub.tumblr.com/post/634815054009778176/black-cats-outta-the-bag-i-was-so-pumped-about) and [here!!!](https://sreppub.tumblr.com/post/636515110985285632/random-phone-doodles-runaway-baby-is)
> 
> If you liked what you read, kudos and comments are always appreciated! Thanks for stopping by, and if you want to yell at me about this fic or anything else that strikes your fancy, I have a Marvel-only blog that can be found [here!](https://ambivalentmarvel.tumblr.com)


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